Have not posted much in a while so I thought I would do two things. First I wanted to see if posting from a google doc had changed from the last time I did it and second we have finally completed a fun, well I thought it was fun, project in grade 6.
We started with a poem the kids wrote in their English class about their greatest fear. They spent some time using audacity where they created an audio track for their poem. A music intro was added and they then exported the audio as an mp3. The kids analyzed the words they used in the poem and then started
looking for different images that might represent these words. They found graphics for their video and uploaded the graphics and audio to Animoto. After setting things up in Animoto they exported the video to Youtube.
The next step was to create a poster. After some discussion about different design considerations the kids created a glog. The glog needed to include appropriate graphics, as well as, the text and video copy of their poem. The students then posted this to their blog and english wik and on the whole it worked quite well.
For the next semester I need to tidy up a few areas. Some students have had
difficulty embedding the glog into their blog or into their wiki. Also I need to create a rubric that helps them better understand the expectations I had for their audio instead of just having a rubric for the poster. Our equipment is not that great but the work they did on the audio could have been better. I also need to get into the habit of screencasting the different parts as with our schedule they forget a lot from week to week.
Anyhow here are some examples. Will be adding more later today.
Remember playing with Muxtapes a while back. Wondered how they could post the music the way they did? I guess Muxtapes had some difficulties but into the void comes 8tracks. This 8track is a few songs loosely organized around Mark Knopfler.
Been having some fun playing with Sproutbuilder. They have added new capabilities that I like. In particular a history that allows me to more easily undo the many mistakes I make. My design capabilities, obviously need some help, but you can create great widgets that mash together all sorts of content. The widget on this page contains text, an RSS feed from one of my class blog categories and numerous videos that my students created. All placed together into a flash based widget.
Recently they added the capabilities of adding a Gform to a widget or your tweets as you can see on my sidebar. All sorts of possibilities.
As with many things this is another tool that I just started playing with to see what it was about. And, like many times, I did not fully get it until I better understood the social aspect of the service. I can follow a person’s travels trough the net by following them in twitter, subscribing to their blogs in a reader or becoming a friend in last.fm but boy does this make it all easier. You can comment to people and respond to tweets …. another addition to my learning network. l wonder if I had more than one friend if the information overload would be a bit much as what I found from one person today took up a lot of my time!! Anyhow I added a Friendfeed feed to my to my sidebar and so far it has been OK with the wordpress sidebar widget.
as what I found from one person today took up a lot of my time!! Anyhow I added a Friendfeed feed to my to my sidebar and so far it has been OK with the wordpress sidebar widget.
