teachNbabble

Playing with Animoto and Glogster

Gary — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:05:57 +0000

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.

http://alishan.glogster.com/AVP-Fear-Poem/

Adding The Sudent Blogs

Gary — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:59:17 +0000

I used to have students blog using one Wordpress install. I would then create student accounts on the site so they could add blog posts to it. This year, with a move to a new school, I thought I would try to change the way I did things. I signed up all the students with an edublogs accounts. This was a bit tough at first I had all sorts of problems with password resets but lately all has been working quite well. What I wanted was to aggregate my student blogs onto one site this “mother site” would be a place where I could post different activities for the students to take part in.

There are two Wordpress plugins that can help this all work, FeedWordPress and WP-o-Matic, both can do what I wanted. I ended up using WP-o-Matic. After installing this plugin and activating it I changed some of the default options in the Options Menu so the Feed Date and the Post title links to source were selected.

I noticed that when I clicked on the post category, in my case Our Class Posts, that I would only get part of the feed. To make sure I got all of the feed I changed the the_excerpt to the_content in the archive page template. This would allow me to see the full feed.

So now the content is automatically created based on the rss feeds coming from each student site. The only thing left to do is adding all of the student RSS feeds.

Visiting Dipity Once Again

Gary — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:17:10 +0000

In on the preview version and it just seems a lot more solid. It was dead simple to create a lifestream. I was surprised at how it could bring everything together into one simple timeline. We will be using it soon with the kids as they study Ancient Egypt, will be interesting to see how it works for them.

Using a Gform to Collect URLS

Gary — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:13:30 +0000

I was having some difficulty aggregating all of the kids different Edublog feeds, I have about 80 kids that are trying out blogging for the first time. I used a google form to get all of the information I would need from each student.

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With the data I then added some columns to the spread sheet that concatenated the information to form a URL. I wanted to add this information to a wordpress blog but wordpress strips the html out of blogposts.

After searching I came across rawHtml a plugin that allows me to inlcude HTML code in a blog. This allowed me to create a list of all 80 of the RSS feeds I have going so now I can aggregate the feeds and comments.

Sample of the first few feeds

ssismar’s Feed
ssismar’s Comment Feed

ssisye’s Feed
ssisye’s Comment Feed

ssisyeon’s Feed
ssisyeon’s Comment Feed

ssismin’s Feed
ssismin’s Comment Feed

ssiskanh’s Feed
ssiskanh’s Comment Feed

ssisji’s Feed
ssisji’s Comment Feed

ssismon’s Feed
ssismon’s Comment Feed

ssistam’s Feed
ssistam’s Comment Feed

ssisjaise’s Feed
ssisjaise’s Comment Feed

ssisjihye’s Feed
ssisjihye’s Comment Feed

8tracks

Gary — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:28:10 +0000

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.

Another tweet….

Gary — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:22:15 +0000

From a tweet sent to @jepcke I read about wordle. So I took my kids reflection on what they learned this week and created a wordle image. I uploaded the image to Flickr using Jing. I then went and imported the images into Animoto from Flickr and on to my Youtube area. The resulting Video is below. Was a bit of fun!!!

Online Textbooks

Gary — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:41:41 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

View: floor level…me on carpet (our shipment made it)…repeat of the Wigam V Chelsea game on TV…dog on carpet…cat running in front of us…weird looking indoor pond in the background. Will look better soon but I will not post any pics for a while.

Dad,…… this sucks. The only thing the online text review gives me is a pdf. Can’t they do better? Something interactive? Not yet I guess Aaron. Maybe WOW needs to develop something that includes the ability to do a linear regression as a path to get more gear.

Sure Dad……… followed by a long talk about how you get gear. For those that think you do not learn playing games, you should have listened to that description.

New PD goal…..look foolish in WOW

I am lazy and I like Zemata.

Dipity Looks Interesting

Gary — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:57:29 +0000

Another interesting timeline tool also includes a list, flipbook and map view. Very easy to import my wordpress blog posts, twitter and Last Fm information and embed into this blog post. Might be an interesting way to aggregate kid’s edublogs post? Anyhow something to play with.

Video Wall

Gary — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:52:07 +0000

Video export from Voicethread to Viddler to Vodpod and embedded into a wordpress page. Kind of a cool way to display kids work. The embedded voicethread looks better than the videos but I need to make room on my ed.voicethread account for next semester. (Video Wall)

Making Widgets

Gary — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:01:25 +0000

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.