Get Your Cat to Teach Reading - Crazy Talk 5

"Get your cat to teach reading," my email to the district office read. I had previously received a picture of a cat, Steve McQueen, via email and in return I made a video clip. The animated video is of Stevie the Cat reciting a poem about....cats. This clip is making the rounds in classrooms and sparking many ideas of how to motivate students.

How did the digital photo transform into an animated video? With CrazyTalk 5 you can transform photos and images into animated characters with suprizing ease. As with most technology I have found that you can use a little or use a lot - the results are impressive. Upload an image and then manipulate the face with a few puppeteering tools. Use Crazy Talk's recording tools, text-to-speech or even your own sound file for the voice. Another click of the mouse and characters reward you with their crazy moves.

What about the part regarding motivating students? Animated characters are a given for motivation. Admittedly no big news there. The big idea is to integrate creating characters to motivate students to build their communication skills of reading, speaking and writing. Students create scripts and practice recording - writing, reading, and speaking. It is up to us to help our students build these skills well.

So many ideas have come out of Stevie the Cat. Biographies, poems, storytelling, story characters, speeches, my pet, your pet, and many more.

I took pictures around our school to make clips of a cast of characters to play on our morning newscast. Who am I? Where do I live? Can you find me? Interest is building, questions are being asked, ideas are blooming. But they have to wait to find out, "How did she do that? When can I do that too!"

Here is the first announcement below. More applications with examples next time, but first meet Digiraffe- our own digital giraffe!

Podcasting, the Super 3 & Tech Lab Activities

Podcasting can improve your child’s reading and writing skills. It’s true. The steps in the Super 3 plan / do / review creating good podcasts require many skills. Students communicate with peers, think through ideas, write (or type) scripts, record, evaluate, and edit-edit-edit. Their favorite part seems to be the challenge of making a satisfactory recording. Students repeatedly listen and record while building fluency skills with each edit.

Some of our 2nd and 3rd grade technology classes are practicing these skills to make their audio and/or video projects. Topics students have chosen include riddles, similes, vocabulary, science, websites, and software. Find more ideas here.

With new 2nd and 3rd graders going to Ms Gardner for technology classes, let’s repeat safety on the Internet. Find out more about potential dangers online. http://www.netsmartz.org/ is a positive place to learn Internet safety. There are no links to outside sites. Go with your child to http://www.netsmartz.org/ for more information.

Students have learned how to format clipart, borders and text in Microsoft Word.
Our hallways are newly decorated with student-made Valentine's Day and signs for Jump Rope for Heart.

Many 4th and 5th grade technology classes are using technology to use reliable resources on the Internet, create electronic presentations, and evaluate their work. Project presentations integrate technology with classroom topics such as presidents, national parks, geometry, and the Revolutionary War. Students learn basic and advanced features in Photo Story 3, Microsoft Word, and Power Point.

iSURFFers say, THANK YOU PTA!!!!!!!!!!!
Students Ready For the Future -iSURFFers - are learning how to save their work with flash drives thanks to our generous PTA! With the purchase of 30 flash drives to use in the lab, our PTA has made it possible for our technology students to practice proper care and functions of flash drives. THANK YOU PTA!!!!!!!!!!

Field Trip, Videos, and Wikis

Last month Gold Hill 4th graders spent two nights at Barrier Island, an environmental camp on Seabrook Island, SC. Included in the three days of classes were lessons and activities about early Native Americans. Students learned about the history and culture of Cusabo tribes along the rivers and the coast of SC. In other classes, students learned about regional plants and animals, their adaptations and how Native American tribes respectfully lived among and used their natural resources.

We incorporated lessons learned into our On theTrail of the First People Project led by Karen Kleigman in NY at MidLink Magazine. Karen's organization of the project offered many new technology choices. The detailed instructions made this highly collaborative project easy to follow.

We set up a videoconference with Adam Dugger's class in NY- Hi y'all! During the Q& A it was evident that ALL students were amazed at the weather difference (unusually warm December in SC), the wide sandy shores, the frequency of bottle-nosed dolphin sitings, the palmetto trees in the maritime forest, the huge horseshoe crabs, and sleeping in cabins on the beach!

Back at school, our students created videos with Photostory3, a free download from Microsoft. Per Karen's instructions, I uploaded an example of student work on Google Video (Beta). I had a gmail account so this part went quickly.


Also with Photostory3/Google video I added a video documenting how we started using wikispaces.

See these videos and the project wiki for more information of starting wikis and other projects at your school. Better yet...go see see Karen Kleigman's presentation at FETC 2008

Authentic Audience

We have first hand experience with the many faces of authentic audience. Fourth grade research projects have brought about audiences in our classroom, down the hallway, up the highways, and across the oceans. Student classwork is seen by many more eyes than just their teacher (with a red pen). Their research,writing and voices are being shared with partners, other classes, on the web, and through video conferences.
Let me explain. Students are researching and using web 2.0 tools (which are different from web 1.0 by creating for the web with more collaboration and interactivity).

If you have used a webcam then you know what it is like to have a video conference. We have had varying degrees of success with live conferencing. This week one of my 4th grade groups had a video conference with a partner class in New York (with Karen Kliegman, Noel Forte, and Adam Dugger)while using Skype. Although we have had “video guest speakers” this was our first time with two classes together. After a few technical snags, we got the hang of it and had fun with Q and A's.

Today we experimented with a newer video conference service http://oovoo.com/ between two classrooms in our own building. This service was suggested by Karen Kleigman (Trail of the First People Project). ooVoo looks very modern and we can see both cameras on our screen while we talk together. Fourth grade students were searching for pictures to use from http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php to go with their Native American project. Video conference participants traded tips and information about their research. They gave good tips on pictures that they found for the regions they were studying. Research groups from different classrooms teamed with each other. From their conversations I can say that our students were great examples for authentic audience and collaboration.

For the next phase, student groups will choose how they want to combine their previous research and the pictures for the Native American project. Choices are PowerPoint, Photostory3, or learn how to create projects in Voicethread. All of these can be put into wiki pages that some of the students are sharing with our partners in Australia and in New York. I am looking forward to the products of our journey with Web 2.o tools.

GHESchool Tour Video

Digital storytelling comes in many forms. In our technology lab we focus on how technology helps us learn and digital stories fit the bill. Technology students have been roaming the hallways with a digital camera and inquiring minds. Students took photos inside and out, and then narrated each one. If their picture was a person, they asked about their job. We discussed choices that did not include a person, such as the purpose of the teacher's workroom. We found people and places that we had never seen before -our school is huge!

Back in the technology lab, students practiced their lines with expression and enthusiasm. The challenge was to construct sentences that began with words other than, "Here is...." or "This is..." We combined narrations with the photos and chose music to fit the mood. Some students even directed the video transitions, effects and text. These steps can take 2-4 class periods depending on the teacher's purpose and preferences of integration.

Each class now has a video of different sections of the school. By combining parts of each video, we also have a video overview of our school.

This project included second and third graders. I have found that older elementary students enjoy the video creating process and are quite creative on their own when given ample time. We have more video projects in the works. One of our next projects will include posting videos on dotsub.com and translating subtitles. Students are creating vodcasts on several topics, so stay tuned for more (or subscribe to this feed).

Let Us Put YOU on the Map!

We have become fascinated by the growing number of red dots on our ClusterMap.

ClustrMaps is the widget you can always find on the right side of this webpage. Go ahead and look for it- double click it and see the details too. It shows locations in the world where someone is checking out this blog. I know who and where a few of the dots are because we are collaborating on projects - more news on those projects as they progress.

By our calculations, we are averaging 4-5 new locations in the world each week!

We need more projects to help our students learn more about their geographic world (and not just to prepare them for any eventual question on a game show – or a pageant….). This is where you come in to the picture – literally.

If you are reading this outside of Fort Mill or Tega Cay, SC, please drop us a line - we would love to hear from you. We want to put YOU on the map! Our classroom has a world map on the wall, and it will grow as our ClusterMap grows. If you are inside Fort Mill/Tega Cay - drop on into our technology lab. We would love to hear from you too.

-JoNelle Gardner, Technology Teacher/Specialist gardnerj@fort-mill.k12.sc.us

Inservice Day - My "Day Off" with "No Students"

Parents: While your child stayed home and played like they were supposed to, teachers had an Inservice Day. What is that exactly? Usually meetings. Today was different. Thanks to our pricipal we had a choice of where we wanted to visit. Below is a blog post from another education blog that I maintain. If I have any techie-type parents, you may want to help out in the technology lab this year. It's not what it used to be! Please read on...

We had an inservice day today - teachers actually visited schools of their choice. This was not your typical day of meetings that may-or-may-not be geared toward your needs of professional development. I jumped at the chance to find a school/teacher experienced in integrating web 2.0 tools in their curriculum. Although a tad over my elementary level, I found an excellent resource not too far away from home in Mr. Chris Craft. Many of us who have researched international collaboration projects have seen much of his work and read his blog http://www.crucialthought.com/

Chris Craft (love the name) came highly recommended and it was all true and then some. I got to see him in his element and I must say - his students adore and respect him. All of his sixth graders came in calmly with smiles and stayed that way the entire time. What wonderful classroom spirit. He loves them and they know it. He respects their identities and their uniqueness and they know that too. After all of the techno-talk I absorbed, I was struck most by his manner about his students and one quote in particular. "I teach children how they want to be taught," he told me. Think about that some more.

What about the techie talk? I learned more about Moodle, PBwiki, Gcast, WordPress, and Google Earth. New for me are great video resources from Dan Meyer at http://blog.mrmeyer.com/, www.trymango.com for self-paced Spanish lessons, www.livemocha.com , WiziQ for a virtual classroom, and bluehost. So many tools...and it is not summer break.

We talked about EdTech 2007 - SC's technology conference October 24-26. We are both presenting. My presentation is "We Vote for Movie Making! Motivate your students using cameras and Classroom Performance System (CPS). " I submitted this before I jumped on the Web 2.0 trail, so now I'll tweak it more to include some.

One of Chistopher Craft's (this how his name is listed on the site) presentation is about presentation design - how cool is that? Another is about Google Earth - yeah! The third is presenting his research "Games and Simulations, is there a place in k12 education? " What a fountain of information he so generously shares.

What a jam-packed Professional Development day for me! What did you do on your last inservice day?