Subscribe

“We loved it, so much better than normal school! ”

This is the student response to inter-school debating online. I thought it was a fantastic experience all round – for teachers and students. Admittedly it was fairly nerve racking at first and I think the teachers were more nervous than the students for the first couple of debates but by the time we had completed three or four it became more routine and quite easy to manage.

The success was due to a number of key factors not the least being a very cooperative and keen partner school. Special thanks to @rakt for his help and organisation. It certainly did help to work with a school who had had debating experience and we learnt a lot throughout the whole competition. Our students were novices with no experience or training in the art of debating.

How does it Work?

The Draw

Create a draw with the debate statements. It is best if you have an affirmative and negative for each debate and then they can practise against each other and it helps prepare for rebuttal statements. In other words if you have 3 Debates you need 6 teams at each school.

Preparing the Arguments

Each team worked together on a shared Google Document that I prepared as a template with some indicators of what would be expected from each speaker. The teams had an “in school” practise debate against each other. They also practised their speeches against the clock to make sure they had the right amount of material.

Format

Each team had 3 speakers who had 90 seconds to present their arguments and rebut the opposing teams arguments. We allowed half an hour for each debate but this gave us plenty of time between debates. Older or more experienced students could have longer. The chairperson was provided by the affirmative team and each school was responsible for their own time keeper. We adjudicated our own students solely on their manner according to agreed criteria and compared scores on the screen while the students turned away or while the projectors were blanked out.

SKYPE Connection

We were fortunate to have a great Skype connection which we had tested well before hand. I had purchased a microphone especially for Skype calls that made it even easier. It allowed the students more freedom to present as it was much more effective in picking up their voices and easier to mute than using the internal microphone on the laptops.

In Summary

Debating is one of those authentic learning experiences where students develop higher order thinking skills. They work together as a team and it is clear which students are team players able to support and encourage others. They develop confidence in speaking and listening skills. There are so many teaching and learning opportunities within such a rich learning environment.

Skype enhances the experience by allowing inter-school debating without the  restriction of cost or location. It brings a whole new level of excitement and engagement when the students debate against another school. Our next debating exercise will be international with a school in New Zealand and I can see that it Skpe Debating will be a continuing part of my school program afterall it is “so much better than normal school”!

Image courtesy of Flickr – Balanced Debate

Create a Great Animation using Free Software

Tux Paint & SAM Animation

Animate A Science Concept

My students have been creating little animations to explain a simple concept such as the life cycle of a plant in grade 2 or a simplified explanation of Global Warming in grades 3 and 4(you can see examples here). The animation project was a bit of an experiment as we hadn’t used Sam Animation before. I’m pleased to say it has been a great success and I can see that the process has possibilities for many areas of the curriculum. SAM Animation is free software as I’ve explained in a previous post.

In a nutshell

1. we used Tux Paint (also free software that you can read about here)to draw a series of pictures and then
2. import the pictures into Sam Animation.
3. we created a series of sound files to narrate the animation
4. import the sound files into Sam Animation.
5. export to movie

It was easy to adjust the length of the pictures to the length of the sound and to finish off we added a title slide. The final step was to export the completed animation to a movie format that we could upload onto our blog.

This is  the detailed work flow for making an animated movie using Tux Paint and SAM Animation. The project can be completed quite quickly by taking advantage of the easy save features in Tux Paint.

Step 1.

Open Tux Paint and create and save the beginning picture for your series of pictures. The key to this, is to choose a topic that you can illustrate as a continuous process by adding a bit more to your picture each time. Add a bit and save but use “No. save a new file!” to quickly build up a bank of illustrations. Remember to save often until you have a number of pictures to illustrate your story or concept.

Step 2: SAM Animation

Open SAM Animation and create a new project. Click on the “Manage Time Line” section to import the pictures you made in Tux Paint.

Navigate to the “saved” folder where Tux Paint saves all the images. This is the trickiest bit of the process because the SAM import pictures looks for JPEG format images but Tux Paint are PNG format images so it can appear that your “saved folder is empty!

Once the pictures are on the timeline you can adjust the speed of the animation using the “fps” slider under the play buttons or the slider above the import buttons which will adjust the selected frames. (See above “Sam screen shot 1″ )

Step 3: Audio

You can import a music and or a narration or record directly into SAM Animation. Importing is as simple as using the button next to the import pictures. Once you have your sound on the track you can stretch or shrink your movie to match using the button. There are two sound tracks so you can have a mixture of voice and music.

Step 4: Movie

The final stage of the process is to export the animation as a movie. There are a multitude of choices but I have found that .Avi works well for us.

SAM Animation is another fantastic piece of free, cross platform, software that is ideal for schools. SAM originally stood for “Stop Animation Movies” which indicates what it does. The software has been designed by the TUFTS Centre For Engineering, Education and Outreach, with the noble purpose of:

-  increasing student and teacher excitement for learning STEM;

-  improving student & teacher skills so learning is more enjoyable in all subjects;

-  increasing the general public’s technological literacy, and

-  increasing the awareness of the importance of STEM for society.

(STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

SAM Animation is easy enough for primary aged students to use, with impressive results, but would be equally  suitable for older students or adults wanting an application to illustrate a concept or tell a story. It has a variety of sophisticated tools to capture, import and manipulate images and sound. It even has the ability to apply the chroma key effect.

Once you have finished your animation there are options to export it into various movie formats which means it is portable for home computers and easily published to a blog or wiki.

The SAM Animation site has a very thorough “help” section with easy to follow movies. It has links to “Latest Animations”, “Related Web Sites”,  research, a forum and community. You can try the online version or download it for your personal use or for educational research. If you register as an educator your principal will need to verify the details that you have supplied but then you are able to use SAM in your school.  All this and its free! Schools should definitely make the SAM investment -  their students will love it.