Stupeflix

Stupeflix is an online tool to create movies with your photos and  video clips. I found it was very easy to use and quickly created a product with from my garden photos that I had already sent to Flickr. Once you have collected your photos Stupeflix lets you organise and group them into sets to appear in the order that you prefer . You can select the transition effects, add text and music. I used Creative Commons, Royalty Free music from Incompetech.com. A site I have often used with my students.

When you are happy with your arrangement (which doesn’t take long) you can generate your movie. I found the .flv movie was better resolution than the larger YouTube option but both movies were successfully generated in a reasonable time. The finished video can be downloaded to your computer or shared using the link. The final step was to upload it to a site like Edublogs.tv so  I could embed the movie in my blog.

It might sound like a lot of steps to work through but when everything works smoothly, as it did with Stupeflix, it’s worth the effort.

My Garden – 2008 – 2009

Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for introducing me to Stupeflix

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.

I started this post with a view to have the “Here Comes Learning” presentation below, support my staff Professional Development presentation about the importance of blogging. I’m sure a number of teachers still wonder why they should consider starting a blog. I spent some time working through the considerable information that Will Richardson presents in just the first twelve minutes (the rest of the presentation will have to wait for another post) and now I realise the question is much bigger than just blogging or wikis.

It’s not “Why should I blog?” but “Why should I be connected?”

Will Richardson is a renown author and leader in the field of Web2.0 technologies in education. He was a presenter at the NECC09 in Washington and I, fortunately, was able to attend the session. His message to teachers is that they must be part of the huge technological shift that is happening, that they must use and own the technologies so that they understand them and so that they will ready to teach students what they need to know about using web2.0 technology in ways that are effective for learning.

Here Comes Learning by W.Richardson and SNBeach

Here Comes Learning – Wiki with more links to this presentation

My summary of the Importance of Teachers being Connected by Will Richardson

• Students use the online world for social reasons but, also, increasingly to learn things -see the video about the bow drill which Will mentions throughout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuFsDN8dsJU&feature=channel_page
• Will quotes Clay Shirky when he says that the ability to form global groups about things we are passionate about which include all levels of expertise and the power of the group in an online world are part of signiificant change – a “Techtonic Shift.
• We have incredible access to raw data (see the Iran tweets, photos). We no longer depend on the traditional news sources to know what is happening. We need skills to critically analyse the information for importance and accuracy.
• These new technologies are having an impact on businesses. Companies monitor the conversation and how people form groups around their products. This is easily seen in Twitter when businesses follow and respond to those who use their product name in their tweets.
• Information Literacy has changed not just the way we write (Twitter and blogs) but the way we read and critically analyse information. New literacy skills are needed and suggested by the National Council of English Teachers :

Develop proficiency with the tools of technology Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

• Students are using the technologies Primarily to Socialise but now they are beginning to connect in interest based ways tapping into the millions of potential teachers, who are out there, when and where they need to do it

The problem becomes that many children/students have no adults that can teach them how to use technologies for ways that are effective for learning. Teachers need to understand these technologies, understand the shifts, own the technologies and make connections for themselves.They need to take time to immerse themselves in internet type environments to meet the challenge of providing students with the skills they will need in the 21st Century.

The second part of this presentation was concerned with the Professional Development model that will support teachers to develop deep seated skills and connections.

I was fortunate to hear Peter Reynolds speak and to receive a free copy of his software “Animation-ish“  while at the Constructivist Celebration @ NECC09 in Washington. This is the one piece of software that I would like to put on my school’s 2010 budget. Peter Reynolds is an inspiring speaker, a talented artist and author.

• I admire the philosophy behind the development of Animation-ish.
  • Peter Reynolds believes in giving children a chance to play and experiment through their passions and unique abilities. Animation-ish is designed to give them the opportunity to express themselves through drawing and animation with the ‘ish’ concept that tells the world ‘back off, I’m trying to figure this out, and right now this is the way I do it’ – gives us some room to play, experiment, LEARN.
• I think it is easy to use but creates a sophisticated finished product in a reasonable amount of time.
  • You can draw with Animation-ish in three very intuitive levels, “Wiggledoodle-ish”, “Flipbook-ish” and “Advanced-ish”.  It is best to have a tablet to draw with but many students these days are used to drawing with a mouse. Animations can be looped and exported in a number of formats. You can read a more detailed review here.

• It has excellent support material, is generally very appealing and works well with the web 2.0 publishing world of today.
  • It has excellent tutorials and “Inspire me” files to get you started. You can register for a series of tutorials taking you through each level of Animation-ish

My first little animation – just so that you can get the idea how simple it is – created in less than an hour.

The only problem is the cost. I was hoping for a whole school site license for less than $2000 (our school has 750 students) but it appears it can only be bought as a volume license for 25 computers at that price. Our school would need 4 or 5 times that just to cover the computers for students in grades 3 to 6. As much as I love it, and can see its advantages, that is far too much in our budget… I can only hope that a whole school site license is released at a more manageable cost.

I’ve just read another blog with a similar view of the Animation-ish software and its value for the classroom.

More Links – The Live Wire

Tux Paint, Tux Typing and Tux Math are three of the ongoing projects belonging to Tux4Kids. Tux Paint, Tux Typing and Tux Math are free software applications that you can download and run on your home or school computers. If you would like to know more, you can read the reviews I have written in my other blog

The aim of Tux4Kids is two fold;

1. to produce free software of educational value so that all schools, children and parents  will have the opportunity to use it
2. to produce an alternative to proprietary software for schools thereby removing the cost and legal barriers to accessing quality educational software resources.

You can find the sites to download the software by clicking on the images below

TUX PAINT                           TUX TYPING                          TUX MATH

I have a subscription to Odiogo which creates podcasts from my blogs. I thought it might be interesting to hear someone else read my blog posts to me. I wanted to see if I could distance myself enough from the original process of writing, to think critically about the content. I’m not a confident writer and have for years avoided writing anything. And I dread rereading my published material for fear of finding mistakes. I subscribed to Odiogo for fun and for the feedback it might provide.

I’ve subscribed to the Odiogo feed in iTunes and now just to see if I could I’ve embedded a player with the feed directly on my blog.The player looks great and is customisable – the screen is blank but I think that is because I don’t have any art work on Odiogo for my podcast. I will be testing this player again on the students podcasts.

The player is free from Podcast Pickle and was extremely easy to set up. I am a fan of this site!

Audio e-Learning – Helping students make sense of their learning!

How often do we ask students to rewrite information in their own words only to find what they have written is nonsensical or merely a rearrangement of the original text with some synonyms thrown in (the clever ones can do this with the online thesaurus) ? It is my experience that students are reasonably good at collecting information but much poorer at making sense of it. They can travel three quarters of the distance on their inquiry-learning journey but fail to fully complete it. They struggle to use the information they have collected to reconstruct the meaning for themselves. They might appear to have done the work but have not really answered their query or created new knowledge for themselves. However, when you ask students to paraphrase or read what they have written they will admit that they are not sure what it means or that it does not make sense. Gordon Wells emphasizes the importance of speech and writing as a means of building and clarifying knowledge.

“the fact that the processes of thinking, such as categorizing, hypothesizing, reasoning, and evaluating, are not only realized in language, in the sense of being made manifest in speech and writing, but also actually constructed and improved through its mediating means.” (WELLS, 2001)

• Students speak before they write and if we really want to know what they are thinking then the first form of communication should be oral especially for primary students who are still in the early stages of developing their writing skills.
• Finding the words to verbally report the meaning is different to finding the words to make a written report.
• Writing is more difficult than speaking and so students are much more likely to write things that do not make sense than they are to say them.
• When they speak they get immediate feedback by listening to themselves and realize that what they have said doesn’t make sense or that they don’t understand the material enough to articulate it.

While planning the curriculum for students in ICT my goal was to have the final product a spoken one so that students were more likely to access and construct information and new knowledge. I wanted to have students more involved in the process by making the realization of new information spoken not just written.

Two examples of Audio e-Learning in Practice

1. PowerPoint with Oral Commentary

My first exercise was to have grade five and six students reflect on what they had found out in their first inquiry unit. The students had completed a PowerPoint with information about their learning styles (visual, auditory or tactile/kinesthetic) and in which ways they were intelligent according to The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Wikipedia) defined by Howard Gardner. They had used online surveys to gather the information and wrote about the results on the slides, noting whether they thought the results were an accurate reflection or not. The final requirement was to create a verbal commentary as a summary of the information on each slide, to enhance the information presented, but not read it word for word to the audience. The students created a series of short sound files and inserted them onto the appropriate slide to play automatically within the slide show.

Technically this was not difficult, but it did challenge a number of students in terms of making the final step in their learning, constructing knowledge for themselves from the information and linking it to their experiences.

The final product with the verbal commentary was insightful and much more engaging for the audience who are usually teachers and other students. Listening to the presentations quickly gave the teacher a clear indication of the student’s critical thinking skills and at which stage of the Bloom’s Taxonomy they are operating. (CHURCHES, 2008)

2. Radio Show

The students at my school have a live one-hour radio show on a community radio station each week (97.7FM 3SER Wed 2-3pm). All students in grade 5 and 6 who want to present on the radio have the opportunity to do. The show involves script writing, collaboration with peers (they work in teams of 4), careful selection of music and practice to deliver their scripts with a credible and interesting voice.

The program has certain elements that students are expected to talk about such as their interests, a community oriented subject and a link to the current classroom inquiry unit but it can include other original material such as stories, poems, songs etc. The radio show provides a genuine audience for their work. The focus is clearly on their oral expression and the digital recording equipment is the key to helping students evaluate and improve their skills.
The students take advantage of every opportunity to interview special visitors to the school. They use the pre-recorded interviews on their show and if applicable spend time editing and adding sound effects or music to enhance the interview. Creating surveys and analyzing the results to share with their radio audience has been another popular topic for some students. This is a very powerful learning experience integrating a number of key curriculum areas with genuine purpose, written (script) and verbal (presentation on radio) articulation of results and authentic audience.

The final element of that has been added this semester is that the students select a 2-3 minute interval of their show to Podcast to iTunes . Students are excited that their work is available in the “real world” and that their parents and friends can download their personal podcast.

As the year went on it became easier to see how to add an audio component to the lessons. More importantly it became clear that students needed to make audio files as a part of their everyday work to help them develop literacy and thinking skills. There are more examples of audio e-learning on our school blog from various grade levels using a variety of programs.

WELLS, G. (2001). Action, Talk and Text: The Case for Dialogic Inquiry. In G. WELLS, Action, Talk and Text: Learning and Teaching Through Inquiry,. Teachers College Press.

Dueling Mics via Flickr by roland

Photo : students completing a radio show in our own studio

THE project is over and all the files have been emailed or sent home on CD or USB drive. Another huge component of the whole exercise – so would I do it again?

Yes I would. The learning for students, teachers (including me) and even parents was considerable. Teachers learnt about network structure, managing files, photos, photostory, email attachments and staying calm while under pressure to complete the project in time for Father’s Day. You can imagine that when there is an emotional investment in a project with young children and their parents that the intensity is magnified. In addition teachers supported each other and worked as a team.

Students had similar learning experiences, photostory, audio, coaching and supporting their buddy with recording, email- but also in resilience and patience while their frazzled teachers found where they had copied the mssing photos, helped edit photos that had been sent in a composite image, tried to download email attachments with strange formats and so on. Some students learnt a lesson about the cost of not being organised which would not of happened with a regular project and assessment. The real evaluation was the students satisfaction and sense of achievement in creating a unique gift for someone in their family so it soon became obvious to those students who weren’t putting in an effort that they were missing out. This was a project with authentic purpose.

The one extra bonus of the whole exercise was the rise of some students as mentors and experts to help other students when time was running out to complete their projects. They became experts in all aspects and part of the team pulling together to get the job done.

Feed back from the parents was fantastic. And yes it would be a project I would do again but with a lot more communication and a couple of extra weeks up my sleeve.

My last multimedia project has involved between 300 and 400 students. The students were required to bring a short series of photos from home to use as digital images as part of a digital story. The students were told of all the ways that they could get the photos to school, memory stick, cd or real photos to be scanned.

It wasn’t long before the enormity of this project began to dawn on me. In reality it was the huge range  of the technological skills and understandings of the adults involved, parents and teachers that made the project soooo big.

Clarity of communication – parents did not understand how much work it was if they sent along their photos for us to scan. Teachers equally needed to understand that part of the expectation was that they would learn how to scan the photos for their own class. I felt the project was in danger of failing if I didn’t support the teachers with this but it was a huge commitment. Thirdly, in retrospect, the project was excellent and met so many VELS/ICT skills but it was the first time it was done and it would have been better if it was planned with the teachers commitment from the beginning. Once they saw the finished products they understood but it was already well into the project.

This is the dilemma of taking hold of a great idea and running with it, balanced with time to plan, consult, and communicate with a team before moving forward. The team approach is the ideal method but not always possible if you are hoping to cease the moment- so then you have to be prepared to fill the gaps and support those who haven’t quite got on board.

We have so far to move in technology before we can expect a consistent experience/expertise from our community. Here we are talking about online communities in our classrooms yet we have teachers, students, and families who are ot familiar with the basics in handling photographs, using USB memory sticks, or transfering files.  Education is incredibly complex when you think of the background each student, family and teacher brings to the equation.