Blog Learning Group – Session 2 – Going deeper

What a great time with great people today!  Thanks for stretching our brains.

**Please note that our next meeting is May 11 (3:30pm) at Burnaby Mountain - this is a districtwide sharing session. 

We talked about a number of things to expand and push our learning in the blog world.  We shared with each other what we hoped the tool would help us do with our students (the kind of learning it would support). 

We had a peek at the strategy to develop and deepen written responses to literature and saw a pre/post student response when this strategy was used.  I think we can say that it was like “night and day” difference. We also added an example of how an audio can be used. (more to come on this one)

STRATEGY: 
PQC  (make a POINT;  QUOTE from the text supporting; make a CONNECTION to personal experience, another book, or some other knowledge).  (From Kelly Young, Pebble Creek Labs)

FRAME to support student learning:

What I noticed most about “<exact place/title of text>”    was  <… Add 2-3 sentences describing what stands out for you >.    When you said, “ < Quote from the text. > “   I was thinking  < Report what was going on in your head the first time you read/heard this part. >.     I think this is < ____ (descriptive adjective)>  because   <…Add one or two sentences explaining why you chose this quote. >.

Have a go at it in your classes and let us know how it went.

ASSESSMENT:
Sometimes its as simple as asking a couple of questions for students to self-monitor their writing/thinking. Ask students to consider the following:

Did you?

• add a new idea to the conversation pointing to a new resource or another blogger?
• add a new question that could further the conversation or thinking in productive ways?

(from Troy Hicks – Digital Writing Workshop)

Posting videos on your blog: 

There are restrictions for posting mp3 or video directly into WordPress (free) but you can find other sites to host them and then hyperlink to them.  
Edublogs.tv is a great site (connected with WordPress) that allows videos to be hosted for educational use.  You don’t have to register but if you do, it is faster to upload as it doesn’t require moderation.
Download Youtube videos (using keepvid.com) and upload it to Edublogs.tv.  You can link these to your blog and voila – it will launch.   (*Note: As with all video streaming, the size of the bandwidth may affect your viewing.)

Other things:

• adding students ids into the blog gave students control over creating their own posts
• creating categories for each book in a literature circle provides organization for all of the posts in a group
• creating links to other books and websites
• Email Mask Generators – protects your email from spam  (Mask Email Image Generator,  Email Icon Generator)

Stay tuned for more as we build our strategies for reading, responding, writing and thinking.  Please comment on anything you wish to see more or any questions you may have.

Vancouver Olympics at our doorstep…

It’s almost here… can you just feel the energy as we get closer and closer to the opening ceremonies.

Here are a few sites that you may find helpful in supporting your class. 

Olympic Torch Relay 2010 is an inspirational video of the start of the flame in Greece to its run around the world: http://edublogs.tv/play.php?vid=7225 

Check out the MEDAL Counts (track the history of the games medal counts):    http://www.ctvolympics.ca/medals/index.html#view=0&code=-1

Creating the Vancouver Olympic Medals?  Read this article by GlobalTV on the connection between First Nations and the Olympics. 

http://www.globaltvbc.com/technology/2010+Vancouver+Olympic+Winter+Games+medals+unveiled/2106246/story.html

Deconstructing the Games is a collection of sixteen infographics by the Vancouver Sun on each of the Winter Olympics events in Vancouver. “Each page will provide a graphic illustration, athletes to watch, trivia, information about the venue and the schedule.”   These posters are in pdf and can be downloaded.  http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Updated+Deconstructing+Games+Collect+2010+Olympic+events+pages/2405436/story.html

 

Olympic official site offers information organized by the sport.  Click on the links to add to your knowledge.   http://www.olympic.org/en/content/Sports/

Become a virtual sportscaster:  This site offers the opportunity to create, to mashup, to bring out that ‘inner broadcaster’ from within and show the world.  Consider the digital literacy skills you’ll be developing:   http://call.ctvolympics.ca/home 

ComicLife Session – GRAPHIC LITERACY

Visual or graphic literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from visual images.  The line “a picture is worth a thousand words” means that images can be ‘read’, which can communicate meaning.  (The graphic novel Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud discusses the history of narrative in visual media.)  David Booth’s In Graphic Detail describes the genre of comics as well as offers lesson plans in graphic literacy. 

How do we share our learning, our understanding of the world through visual images?  How do we tell a story (fiction or non-fiction) through this medium?  How do we allow our students a voice who see the world in this way? One way is through using ComicLife – a software program that in essence create comics.  By guiding students through the process of communicating in graphics, bubbles and text, a story emerges.  It may be that your learning intentions are ‘beginning, middle, end’, or define a problem solving situation, or a storyboarding journey of the amoeba or cloud formation, literature circle response between 2 characters…

HOW TO START?  Instructions, ideas and lesson plans are on our Learning Technologies QuickPlace .

IMAGES – WHERE ARE YOU?

ComicLife will accept almost any image – personal drawings can be photographed (or scanned), saved and inserted; get your inner photographer to take photos of students in tableaus or download online images. 

The following are copyright free images that you can use for projects in ComicLife, Publisher, movies, msword or powerpoint. 

• Open Photo:  http://www.openphoto.net
• Burning Well:  http://www.burningwell.org
• Unprofound:  http://www.unprofound.com
• Clipart by Philip Martin : http://www.phillipmartin.info/clipart/homepage.htm 
• Copyright Friendly / Copyleft images:   http://copyrightfriendly.wikispaces.com/

Casting Your Voice – Podcasting

How do you provide an avenue for voices to be heard?  Or how do you create the environment for digital literacy to flourish? One such opportunity may be found in audiocasting (or podcasting).  I’ve written about this before but this is really taking the ‘ole time radio broadcasts’ and placing them in the hands of wider audiences. Podcasting comes in many forms: digital story or play, informational (‘public service announcements’- PSAs), commercial or radio broadcast, booktalk, review learning, interviews, school news…

All that is needed is the content (what are you trying to say or share with the world), a handy audio recording program like Audacity or even Photostory, a computer and a place to store or host the podcasts. 

WHAT’S OUT THERE!

To give you a flavour of possibilities, here are some examples of podcasts that students and teachers have done:  (*more can be found listed in my delicious account)

• Youth Radio: http://youthradio.wordpress.com/ 
• GirlTalkRadio(Math-Science):   http://www.braincake.org/girltalk/GirlTalkAbout.html
• From Ottawa: http://portableradio.edublogs.org/
• Willow Web:  http://millard.esu3.org/willow/radio/ 
• English (Secondary): http://podcourse.blogspot.com/ 
• Chem Alive (Secondary): http://www.chemalive.info/chemalive/Welcome.html 
• Teachers Teaching Teachers: http://teachersteachingteachers.org/

INSTRUCTIONS and HOW TO’S (processes and software): 

(*Note: before downloading, check to see if Photostory3, Audacity, video mp3 extractor is already on your base image)

• http://toolkit4blogwalker.wikispaces.com/Podcasts
• http://epnweb.org/
• http://teachdigital.pbworks.com/podcasting  (Wes Fryer)
• How to use PhotoStory as a podcasting tool – click here
  • Photostory template (you must have Photostory3 loaded to be able to open this template)
• video mp3 extractor program – to download click here  
• Audacity program – to download click here.   (*download lame encoder too)

January Newsletter Arrived

My January Newsletter has been published.  See the link above under Newsletters – Zonal.  You can also click here for the current one.

Blog/Wiki Group – Extending the Conversation

A great group of folks met on Thurs. January 7th at Schou for a learning journey on extending experiences and conversation with students through using blogs and wikis.

I will post up all additional learning sequences for classroom use as well as other resources that you may find helpful.  You can find them all by clicking on the Category – Blogs/Wikis or Literacy – Writing. Check back often.

Here’s a video that classes and teachers may wish to use to explain what happens to information that is placed up on the web.  Comes from Common Craft and is a great 2 minute clip in easy to understand language.  Click here.

Quick Tips:

Adding images or documents or pdf - Use the Upload/Insert button above.  Once you’ve uploaded it once, it gets placed in your Media Library and you always have access to use it. (You don’t have to upload it again and you save on your space.)   **For your documents (schedules, trip notices…) it is a good idea to convert documents to pdf (eg. Cutepdf) before uploading.  

Custom Headers:  Add splash interest to your site by customizing your header – personalize it to reflect your subject area and change it ever so often.  Go to your dashboard > Appearance > Custom Header.  Follow the steps to crop the image so it will fit. 

Adding Authors to your site:  If you’re at this stage, please email me to get some options on this.

DLRC Resources for Lit Kits: See in portal – DLRC > Resource lists

Reluctant Writers Writing

Have you ever faced some very reluctant writers? You know what I mean; those students who would rather eat spinach or stare down a crocodile than put pencil to paper!  I must admit that I’ve spent some sleepless nights trying to find some snazzy way to entice, to engage and provide opportunities for every learner to have voice.   Over the next months, I hope to share some learning here about digital writing (or writing using digital tools) and writing workshop that addresses differentiation.

I’m starting off with poetry…. oh you can just hear the groan!  It’s a great way to work with language, emotion and visual images.  Research tells us that individuals who remember or who comprehend deeply do so because they remember the emotions evoked or have a movie playing in their mind. I know-what’s a thing like comprehension doing in a topic that’s supposed to be about writing? In fact, they’re interconnected. And part of great writing is making sure the reader “get what’s in your head”.

So I’ve been playing with a little site called PicLits.  This is a 21st century version of those crazy refrigerator literacy magnet games.   The site provides incredible images and an organized wordbank  (categorized in nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives..) for students to drag-and-drop onto their image.  Each image has its own wordbank. 

What did I do?  Our goal? – practice combining and expanding vocabulary to produce really ‘juicy phrases’ that enhance an image (eg. understanding that images and words evoke/enhance powerful mental images). Using the website in the classroom, I modeled (using a projector) with a selected image,  how to use the words in the wordbank, selecting, swapping and adjusting as I spoke aloud my thinking strategy (eg. make my ‘thinking bubble’ explicit). I invited help from the audience in finding the right words to capture emotion and a “story that’s begging to be told”.  (Here’s where a Smartboard would have really come in handy.)  Our completed poem was a freeform style, which we screen captured so we had something to refer to later.  Then we practiced using a bunch of photos that I grabbed from magazines.  In pairs the students came up with words/phrases to describe (visual, emotional) their photo. Each of the pairs did a 4-pair share.  As we didn’t write these down, they ended up helping each other reword their creations.  I call this a happy accident. If  groups or individuals found really cool ‘juicy’ words or phrases, they wrote it on scrap paper and posted it on the word wall.  (*If you use chart paper to post these phrases, it can be taken to the lab with you as a guide.)    

Then it was lab time.  (*Do a fast review of the website – I used Insight (lab management software) to help with the details.) Although each student had their own computer, they sat next to their learning partner so the partnership could continue supporting each other.  Some students chose to keep to the drag-and-drop method, choosing their words and rearranging them to make them more powerful.  Others who were more adept at language went the freestyle method.  No matter what, we stopped every 15 minutes and swapped with another student (a bit of musical chairs and a bit chaotic) to give feedback.  These were scribbled on post-it notes and stuck on their monitors.  (*In prior lessons, we spent some time on learning how to give feedback.)

Here are some results:

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

WHAT DID I NOTICE?  The engagement level went sky high.  Those reluctant writers were focused as it was easier to select words from a list and still come up with fabulous writing just like everyone else.  The images were captivating to give depth and imagination to a story.  Choice was key.  Use of post-it notes a novel element – no one wanted to waste their stash of notes on saying things that didn’t make a difference (IM language, shorthand, phrases and no worries of spelling all accepted as long as the receiver understood the information).  Their comments had to make sense and be specific with examples.  Students asked for more editing and re-editing time to make their poems really jump out. 

Here’s a simple rubric  (in msword so you can edit) in case you’re wondering what we used. You can also use your writing performance standard.

I WONDER:  what would happen if everyone did the same image – what words would come out…And could this be used for ‘point-of-view’?  I’d be very interested if anyone has tried this or would like to try this learning journey and post a comment on your journey or any questions.

How do I help my students who need adaptations or modifications?

  There are as many options within learning technologies as there are forms of adaptations or modifications.  Beginning with the goal in mind (eg. what do I want my student to accomplish/learn/know…) will help to narrow down the range of tools.   Here are some that you may consider (list is not exhaustive).   For more information, please contact me.  We can help you through the logistics of selecting the right program and required setups before you decide to invest your budget and time.  Checking with your district learning support teacher is also a great place to start. 

 Boardmaker – Most of you have this in your buildings to create picture symbols for communication.  The site – Adapted Learning has many templates for your download. Wow – someone has done the work for you! 

Reading (text-to-speech) / Writing Supports:

 Kurzweil 3000 - Supports reading (text-to-speech) and writing.  This program will read almost any digital text (text and web).  The study skills option provides added support in reading comprehension. Note-taking can be done directly on the text or online to be later converted to outline for writing.  As well, all the content can be converted to .mp3 for use on mp3 players and ipods.  Implementation of this program can be difficult as it is so complex.  Learning Technologies and Learning Support can be of great assistance.  This detailed checklist was developed to walk you through the steps.  Please contact me if you plan on getting this program for your school.

 Solo Literacy Suite - This updated group includes CO-Writer, READ: Outloud, WRITE: Outloud; DRAFT: Builder. Similar to Kurzweil 3000, however, Draft: Builder includes the option of brainstorm webs. 

 WordTalk: This tiny application has been included into the base image.  WordTalk is the versatile free add-on for MS Word that provides text-to-speech, a talking spell checker, and conversion of text to  MP3 audio format.  You need to launch the application and add the toolbar to MSWord. 

Organizational Supports / Writing Supports:

 Inspiration 8;  Kidspiration 3:  The ‘Spirations’ series are phenomenal tools that start with brainstorm webs where categories and details can be grouped.  This produces a visual way to organize thinking prior to writing.  Both have an audio/speech feature to support reading and written output.  Inspiration can also handle inserting of video. Teachers can use the video option as a way to start brainstorming a topic.  A great option to use with those students who have difficulties with working/short-term memory.  Students can find little video clips or create their own to insert into their web to explain their thinking.  What a powerful way to integrate multiple ways of knowing into one.  The end product can also be exported as a graphic and/or in a written format of MSWord. Well organized essays – here we come!

Next time, we’ll talk about ebooks and other stories that can be brought into the classroom.  If you have other sites/programs that you like using, please drop a comment by using the comment box.

Simple Audio Recorders:

 Photostory3:  This isn’t just for making movies.  You can use our handy podcasting image to create audio recordings and export them as .mp3. This is a great tool as it’s stable, simple and the mp3 file can be played on mp3 players, ipods and on the web. 

 Audacity:  This tool allows simple recording but also multi-track recordings.  You can jazz up recordings with background music and special effects. The export feature allows flexibility in playing too.

What’s NEW on the frontier…

As we’re hip deep in report cards, here’s some ideas to take your mind off all that writing. 

This site from the creators of Wikipedia brings 11 000 videos from all over (Youtube, Google videos, National Geograhic, Schooltube, Internet Archive…) in an organized format.  Meant for early primary to secondary, this resource is a one-stop-shop for science, social studies, humanities, human interest, literacy and other related topics.  The history option allows you to find videos previously loaded.

 

Do fun stuff with your photos – create a magazine cover, a movie poster, or a photo booth, a pop up poster.  These are only a few ideas to create a splashy entry to your powerpoint presentations or your movies.  The free site is easy to use.

 

For SCIENCE PEOPLE – This 2.5D fluids-based demonstration program acts as a physics-based paint program. Users insert objects and see them interact under the laws of physics (has an advanced fluid simulation, gases, rigid objects or even elastic properties). With the escape-codes, users can mix the properties of elements together. You can also add pictures to the simulation! Great for use with SmartBoard.  Click on video icon to see an introduction. 

 

 

SCIENCE – HUMAN SKELETAL SYSTEM – A fun way to remember all those bones.  This interactive site gives practice in naming the bones of the skeleton. A great addition to your grade 5 science unit on skeletal systems.

 

Copy-right Friendly and Copy-left Images and Sound is a site that houses images, sound files, for use in media projects, webpages, blogs and wikis.  A great wiki site that does the work for you!  Just scan the library for images or sound effects that you need to jazz up your presentations.

So what is really on those crazy computers that I can use!!

On Thurs. November 19th at Gilmore (3:30-5:00 pm) in the lab,

we’re gathering to check out and familiarize ourselves with what software on the elementary image that we can use to strengthen our curricula.  We’ll be delving into the power of INSIGHT (lab management software in many of our elementary and all secondary schools) as well as what’s powerful that I can add to my repertoire.  This session is meant as an overview of what’s available and how we can powerfully connect it to our teaching.  Consider the learners in your class and see what is available to support each learner.  Then decide on what you would like to use or further investigate.  Please email me if you are planning to attend.