The Classroom 2.0 Live Shows are such a great resource. Even though participating live would mean being up at 3am (and I couldn’t guarantee the quality of my input even if I could stay awake until then) I can access the recorded show on the Classroom 2.0 Live site. In addition, each show is supported with links to many resources.

The show on October 10th was all about Weebly the ‘drag and drop’ web site and blog creator. The guest presenter was Dan Veltri the founder of Weebly who clearly explained how it all works including the new “Education” features. The questions from the teachers who participated in the live show answered the questions that any teacher thinking of using Weebly would ask. All in all I found it very informative and helpful.

The shows are recorded in Elluminate so the links load the file and open in Elluminate on your computer. The presenters provide a short Elluminate tutorial at the beginning. Once the show has loaded into the Elluminate window you can drag the player around to where you want to be in the recording which goes for over 2 hours.

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.

This is a step by step guide to creating a VoiceThread using still images created in Tux Paint or with photos.

PART 1- Create Identity Pictures on TUX Paint

1st Week- Get the students to draw an image of themselves on Tux Paint (a new program on the network).

The drawing tools are similar to other drawing packages but when the students click “Save” it saves automatically into in a folder called “saved”. These pictures are much more user friendly for PhotoStory, Voicethread and blogs as you will not have to export them before you use them.

Here is a link to a short video on how TuxPaint works.

Ask students to draw themselves (head and shoulders will do). Save it and start a new file for free drawing (use the new button to avoid copying over the image that they have just done.)

Use Save and New to start another drawing.

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PART 2- PHOTOS

Take photos of the student’s work – no faces but you can be creative if you want to include the students holding or pointing to their work somehow. Photos will work better if you don’t use the highest resolution on your camera because the photos have to be uploaded to the internet and smaller size photos will load more quickly.

Alternately you could have the students draw about the work they are doing in Tux Paint.

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PART 3- VOICETHREAD

3.1 Photos or Pictures

Go to the VoiceThread site, click on “Create”and Login with the details you used when you signed up. Upload your photo or photos from your computer. You can have a page for each student, or a page for a group of students, or a single page.

If you haven’t signed up yet, and you need some help, you could use these directions How to sign up for Voicethread as an educator.

3.2 Identities

Make an Identity for each student in your class. Once these are made they are in your account for any new VoiceThreads that you make- you only have to do this once!

Type the student’s first name only and then browse to find their picture that they have made in Tux. (At our school it will be in “L drive” in the students folder in “saved”.) You will be able to see the image if you view the thumbnails. VoiceThread automatically allocates an icon for each name so the Tux pictures can be added later if you prefer by using the edit button.

Once the identities have been made you are ready to start recording the student comments.

3.3 Audio Comments

Comments can be added in a number of ways.

Method 1: In my experience it is easier to have the students record their comments with their buddy helper using another program and then to upload the comments into VoiceThread as they are finished. If you are using this Method then I would use AudioTouch (which is in the programs folder) to record the audio. The students can record more than one file as VoiceThread allows more than one file on each identity or you can “join” all the audio files in AudioTouch to make it quicker to upload.

Method 2: You can have the students come to the teacher’s computer with VoiceThread and record directly onto their identity one by one. Similar to a class Photostory.

Make sure you choose the right identity for each recording. It is easy to forget to change and it can not be moved to another identity- it has to be deleted and redone.

There are VoiceThread tutorials on your VoiceThread account which are well worth a look. If uploading photos and sound takes a long time then the settings on your computer may need adjusting.

Once you have finished your VoiceThread you can embed it onto your class blog. If you update the VoiceThread then it automatically updates on your blog as well.

Why Do We Need to Have It?

When I find a blog that interests me I inevitably check the “About Page” of the author before I decide to subscribe. It’s the same for Twitter. I will not follow someone who doesn’t have a Bio of some sort, and preferably a link to their blog. Why is it important? I think it is about trust. I’m letting people into my Personal Learning Network and connecting to their network. I want to be associated with credible, interesting and talented people or at least people with similar interests and careers. The “About Page” is the social chit chat before you get down to business.

What Should Be On It?

Once you have shared a little bit of information about yourself – a balance of professional highlights mixed with smidge of personal interests – so that you start to create a connection with your readers, then it is time to move on to the  purpose of your blog and the sort of things you will be writing about.

Michele Martin from the Bamboo Project Blog has an excellent example of an about me post and a separate post on what to find on her blog.

Another interesting post written by Skellie  How to Write the Perfect ‘About’ Page (by Numbers) is quite helpful if you are at all in doubt about what to write.

And finally the QuickSprout blog lists 4 essential items for an “About Me” including a picture of yourself “no matter how ugly” you are!

It looks like I should take my own advice and update my “About Me”, which up until now has been a short paragraph in a text widget in my side bar. The text widget is a nice way to keep and extract of your bio but it probably should link to the “About Me” page which has all the extra important details mentioned above.

Photo: Flickr – Tony Hall

Blogging like anything else has protocols and “political correctness” that you become aware of once you are part of the environment. Linking is one the big must dos, not just because it is the right thing to give credit if you have used others ideas and writings, but for self interest because it helps people find your blog as well.

Others have written about this in a far more eloquent way than I have so the following links are ones that I have found practical and very informative.

This post from the Problogger clearly explains why you should link in your blog and how it can help you develop an audience.

The Edublogger tells you how to link to other blogs and gives the following reasons for linking

1. A person’s blog if you mention a blogger.
   
2. The post if you are talking about a particular post on a blog”

Linking is an important part of blogging but do it for the right reasons. Don’t overlink or it’s a bit like crying wolf. Readers will only follow your blog if you have genuine content with relevant links.

Photo thanks to Flickr

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

This is a step by step guide for teachers to sign up for a free educator account on Voicethread.

1. Go to Voicethread and click on Register.

2. Continue to Register for a new account

3. Continue to fill in the details but click on the Educators link not the register button.

Fill in the details about your school to prove you are an educator and use your edumail or school email address in the School email address section.

Click on “apply” and then all you have to do is click on the link that will be sent to your school email address.

You now have a free educators account. You can upgrade to the Pro Educators account for a one off payment of $10 which will give you more storage. Compare the two accounts and decide what is best for your needs.

This is the final blog of a series about using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. This section looks at  our school’s “practice run” using blogs in the classroom and the lessons we learnt.

BEGINNING BLOGGERS

We had a clear purpose, and support from the school leadership to move forward on the weblogs. Once we started our blogs, eleven in all, it became clear that we needed some guidelines to define the tone and purpose of the class blog pages. One of the surprising comments from teacher who looked at the work the others were doing but wasn’t actually a participant was that “this could be used by parents to compare teachers.” Clearly this wasn’t the tone that we wanted.

In retrospect and for the future the main philosophy /guiding principals should be:

• The class blogs are collective blogs to give you and your students a voice and a way to communicate with the local and global community. For example if you browse through “ejourney with technokids” you can see the opportunities that Web 2.0 has opened up for communicating and collaborating. According to the interview transcript shown on the blog, the students particularly enjoy talking to students in another country.
• The class blog is an avenue for students’ to construct meaning through reflection and sharing their learning with an authentic audience. TaNuj^’s Weblog is an excellent example of a student reflection. It is also for teachers as can be seen by Dean Groom’s response to the student blog.
• The blog can add impetus to the Inquiry Process through collaboration with experts in the field. [In M3’s blog on Sustainability the students each give their ideas in their own words adding to the knowledge of the individual.
• It is an opportunity to showcase your grade and the work that you and your students do, and to keep parents and the community informed.

However the impact was immediate. The communication about classroom work in the first few blogs was far more than had gone home in the past year. It was visual, informative and varied according to the class, just as each class is different each blog had an individual feel to it and the added bonus was that the first comments were from students.

Conclusion

My initial idea sounded like a simple solution to a problem. Now I understand how complex it really is and how much work there is still to do. I also understand that it was absolutely necessary to take this step…leap, …plunge into web 2.0. In fact I find it difficult to image a classroom that should not be using the web 2.0 tools in some way. I am inclined to agree with Hargadon when he said it was bigger than the printing press

One last example of web 2.0 in education, and perhaps my favorite, is an infant grade in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. The students have pre-service teachers as blogging buddies. The student teachers follow one child’s writing in Mrs. Cassidy’s blog throughout the year, responding to the child’s blogs, but noting the development in writing over the year. A win win situation all around. In an interview Cassidy explains what she does in her classroom and how each student has a blog, which is an online portfolio, and how blogging buddies work with her students. (Cassidy, WOW2 Show #91, 2008). Clearly Cassidy is an outstanding educator with very good technological skill. She has many awards to her credit, but Cassidy has shown that student age is no barrier to using Web 2.0 tools with students and how powerful it can be for communicating, creating and collaborating.

Additional Helpful Links
http://deangroom.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-3rs-are-now-the-3ts/

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2006/09/posting_student.html

This is part 2 of a series of blogs about using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. This section looks at the reasons why we need to change the way we teach to include web 2.0 tools.

What Do the Experts Say About Web2.0 Technology in Education? – Part 2

Steve Hargadon- “Web 2.0 is the future of Education” (Hargadon, 2008)

Hargadon is director of the K12 Open Technologies Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the founder of Classroom 2.0. The social network Classroom 2.0 has over 13,000 members who are(Classroom 2.0, 2008) interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education. He is well respected and very active in writing and speaking about Web 2.0 issues relating to education.

Hargadon believes “that the“ read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. (Hargadon, 2008)

He identifies ten trends that have particular importance for education and learning. I have summarized and combined the trends into categories that I think will make sense and be relevant to our school situation.

Information, collaboration and opportunity are part of our core business as educators. We have a responsibility and a moral obligation as teachers to help students access the tools they will need to make sense of their real and online world. Web2.0 is already part of all forms of modern communication, providing access and opportunities now and in the future so it must be included in the school curriculum.

David Warlick

David Warlick  is an educator, author and consultant in educational technology. He is a strong supporter of Web 2.0 and advocates that teachers take advantage of the unique capabilities of the technology.

“David Warlick has been an innovator and leader in the field of educational technology and a prolific programmer. His classroom blogging site, Class Blogmeister, serves more than 100,000 users, and his attribution tool, Citation Machine, receives more than a half-million page views a day.”(Warlick D. , 2006, p. Bio)

“Blogs have grown like a range fire and they have exerted amazing influence on our lives, causing us to redefine journalism and political activism. Blogs also hold enormous potential for education as teachers and administrators have a new avenue for informing and inviting the broader learning community and for students as they learn to communicate by becoming part of the global conversation.”(Warlick D. F., 2005, p. 5)

He discusses the way our economic system has changed from the Agricultural Age through the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age that we have today. He explains how and why the curriculum must change to address the nature of information that is a result of technology.

He groups the Web 2.0 outcomes into three purposeful areas for educators and students. Collaboration, communication and information are three essential elements for rich inquiry based classrooms. There is no easier way to achieve these elements than to use the web 2.0 technology.

“Today, the world is a different place. Our sense of the future has changed, our students are different, and the very nature of information has changed. Technology has advanced at a rate that would have been unbelievable to me when I was growing up. As a result, there is a fundamental question that faces us today, as educators and as communities. What do children need to be learning today? ..and How do they need to be learning it?”(Warlick D. , 2006, p. Welcome)

References:

Classroom 2.0. (2008). Main. (Hargadon, Producer) Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Classroom 2.0: http://www.classroom20.com/

Hargadon, S. (2008, July 25). Web 2.0 is the Future of Education. Retrieved November 2008, from Steve Hargadon K-12 educational technology: collaborative web technologies, free and open source software, and the future of education. : http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/07/web-20-is-future-of-education-talk.html

Warlick, D. (2006). Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from CoLearners: http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?page_id=3

Warlick, D. F. (2005). Raw Materials for the Mind. Raleigh, North Carolina, USA: The Landmark Project.

Convert Your Web Page to Web 2.0 and Your Staff Along with It. #1

This is the first in a series of blogs describing our school’s journey to using Web 2.0 technology in our classrooms . It includes the background research, reflection on a trial run, and problems and possible solutions.

Why Change to Web 2.0?

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is not a new invention but a shift in the use and capabilities of the World Wide Web. Previously the Internet was used mostly to retrieve information but now, due to changes in the software, users can easily and without technical knowledge participate as contributors, collaborate online and have access to online software.

“These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies (the practice of catgorising content through tags).” (Stilton Studios, 2008)

Teachers and students who participate in Web 2.0 have powerful tools to construct knowledge, collaborate locally and globally and to be creative with many powerful and free online tools (think, communicate  and create).

Part 1: The People:

Since discovering web2.0 (blogging, online personal learning networks, wikis) I can’t help but feel all teachers should know and use these tools. I’m not sure if it is part of human nature that we have to share and bring others onboard to think the way we do because it is reaffirming or because we believe it is important and our duty to nurture our peers.  I feel there is an urgency to inform teachers about the educational online world. So much is going on in the “webasphere” especially in education, that if teachers are not connected then I fear they are being left behind and can only provide an outdated education program.

Part 2: Community  & Communication

The web site at our school is professionally designed and provides lots of information for parents and prospective families about the history of the school, the curriculum it offers, newsletters, contact details etc. However the communication is directed one way- out to the community. Even then only one or two people in the school have the technical knowledge required to upload information. Putting student work on the web page for viewing is limited by the time it takes one person to do it and without any avenue for feedback, one wonders if anyone even sees it.

Part 3: The Solution:

To solve both problems I believed we could convert the web page to weblogs and by giving the staff ownership of their own class blog they would begin to learn about web 2.0. This sounds simple, but of course there are many complications and responsibilities when you combine publishing material to the wider community, students work, and multiple teachers with a wide range of skills and knowledge.

•    Student safety and privacy,

•    school integrity, and

•    teacher’s professional image

…all have to be considered and protected. And this is a big change in the underlying philosophy of a school, which until now has had almost complete control of material that was published or written to the school community. The school now has to consider the “digital identity” that it is creating.

The Australian, Victorian Department of Education has links to documents, advise and help guides for schools and teachers who want to start their own web 2.0 pages. I have linked to some of the material below.

Documents School Must Have

Internet Acceptable Use Policy for Students

Student Images Agreement

Acceptable Use Policy for School (or Department’s) ICT Systems

Documentation Teachers Should Read

Copyright Information Sheet for Schools(National Copyright Unit, 2008)

Student safety and blogging(DEECD, 2008)

Global Teacher – Blog Directory and Web 3.0 Community(Global Teacher)

It is important to have the essential cyber safety rules and protocols in place before starting weblogs to protect student online identity. For example

• Student photos if the student can be easily recognized will not be used
• Only first name and grade, or initials, or an online name will be used
• All comments will be moderated by the teacher before appearing on the page

In our trial period we decided to follow the Department’s(DEECD, 2008) advice with becoming “proficient with your own teacher blog” (DEECD, 2008) before creating any student blogs. From my own experience the best way to understand how blogging can facilitate learning is to have your own blog and this is one time in teaching ICT that I think it is important for teachers to have prior learning before introducing it to their students.

References

DEECD. (2008, Oct 21). Teacher > Global > Blogs. (S. o. (DEECD), Producer) Retrieved Nov 12, 2008, from Department of Education and Early Childhood Development State Government of Victoria

Stilton Studios. (2008). Glossary. Retrieved November 12, 2008, from Stilton Studios: http://www.stiltonstudios.net/glossary.htm#w