Recently read 03/04/2010
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Kidblog.org – Blogs for Teachers and Students
“Kidblog.org is designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with their own, unique blog. “
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Making an Animoto Video
By · CommentsWe played this video at the goodbye assembly for Margaret Read MacDonald on Friday afternoon. (We’ll have to settle for a link today. The embed code is not working for some reason.) We wanted a quick video or slide show to summarize the three days for everyone. Pressed for time, we needed something that would be easy to make and exciting to watch. We turned to Animoto. It turns photos into slide shows and synchs the photos with music. From camera to video on the desktop, here’s how I made the video.
The Steps
- Extracted the photos from the camera into iPhoto.
- Exported the photos to a folder on my desktop with the settings medium quality and large size.
- Logged in to my Animoto Pro account (free for educators).
- Selected Create Video > animoto originals > Full Length.
- Uploaded the photos, arranged them by dragging and dropping, and added some text slides.
- Selected music from the Animoto collection (could use own collection too).
- Selected an image pacing speed of 1/2 and a video cover image .
- Added a title and description and selected Create Video.
- Waited about 10 minutes for it to render.
- Downloaded the video to my desktop.
I completed all of those steps in just under one hour. That included some discussion with Beth Gourley about the title slides and some text slides. Not bad. I wasn’t totally pleased with the video created though. Some of the photos I uploaded and some of the text slides I created did not make it into the video. At least they were not prominent enough to be noticed. With more time I would have remixed this. Animoto gives us a remix button that creates a totally different slide show. But it was nearly 2pm and I had to set this up at 2:30, so I took what I had at the moment. I could still remix it though as it’s still sitting in my video collection.
Animoto is a great way to create exciting movies from photos. You can even add videos. You can synch it with the music in the Animoto collection or add your own. I think a voice over would work well. But by itself, it’s not creative video making at all. It’s really just uploading and button pushing. To get creative, try downloading your video and then importing it into your favorite video making application like iMovie. I think Animoto videos make excellent transition pieces or introduction type movies. Give it a try!
Recently read 02/16/2010
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Weblogg-ed » The Big Questions: Now What?
“So as of today, 220 of you were kind enough to vote on what you thought were the 10 most important questions from the list that we generated at Educon. Here are the “winners” at the moment:
1. How do we support the changing role of teacher? 116″
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
From Create the Future Workshop Comes a Project
By · CommentsIf someone were to pitch to you a globally collaborative project for your students, what would be your first question?
Last weekend, I participated in Create the Future: Become a 21st Century Learner workshop led by Kim Cofino and Julie Lindsay. The well-organized, thought-provoking activities and the people there made for an excellent workshop. I spent two days in a small team of four. (A quick shout out to Heather, Ben, and Richard. I’ll get my stuff on the wiki soon. Promise.) We all worked in teams to create globally creative projects to take back to our respective schools. This wasn’t an academic exercise. It should fly. But one question pestered me throughout the two days. How can I justify participating in a globally collaborative project?
The standard answer here goes something like, “Students should participate in globally collaborative projects to sharpen their collaboration skills, gain awareness of different perspectives, and learn to be creative problem solvers in today’s connected world.” I get that. But when teachers tell me they don’t have time to participate in a globally collaborative project, I get that too. It’s not, however, really about being too busy. It’s about reaching learning goals before the unit is up and we’re on to another one. That NETS•S talk about connecting, creating, and collaborating is all fine but this current unit of inquiry is the real deal. We have learning goals. How can that project take my students closer to taking action on their inquiries? That’s what it’s really about.
A globally collaborative project should take students closer to their learning goals in ways that they could not do otherwise.
Our project focused on the upcoming grade 5 exhibition. Since all of us except Heather, a grade 3 teacher, have exhibitions coming up it seemed a natural fit for a collaborative project. (Heather participated in the planning of this project even though it would not be one that her students could join. Thanks Heather!) In a nut shell, it’s about opening up reflection. Students reflect on their learning experiences and share their reflections with teachers, classmates, and fellow exhibition students at BISS (Ben) and SSIS (Richard). Why bother? Students can share with each other in the classroom. And how will this project generate better reflections and create a better reflection experience? In the past, reflections were hand written in notebooks and shared mostly with teachers and sometimes with classmates. Pretty closed. Why open reflections? Why share with others? If this project is going to fly, we have to answer those questions and build the project upon those answers.
Here’s what we came up with. We believe that sharing is learning. And that students sharing with students in other schools will draw out from students more meaningful reflections because they will connect with students based not on proximity but common interests. And here’s what this reflection sharing looks like. We have a home base. It’s a VoiceThread group. Students create their reflections on VoiceThread and then share them with student groups formed around a common interest, maybe a line of inquiry. Students view and listen to the voicethreads that resonate with them the most. They then comment on the reflection. Ideally, it is a thoughtful comment that helps the author move forward. And maybe the reflection reveals to the viewers something new and useful as well. The aim here is to form a community of learners who work together to move forward together. That kind of experience, I believe, is more meaningful and sustainable than one that can be achieved without such collaboration. But I don’t know and I’m very eager to find out.
I’m going to pitch this idea to the grade 5 team next week. Their first question will probably focus on how is that better than what we are doing already. Good question. I’ll tell them creating situations for students to follow and act on their interests is creating inquiry-based learning experiences. If we want students to deepen their engagement in their reflections, then we want them to connect with authentic audiences that matter to them. Maybe they can get that right in their own classroom. Great! But maybe they can’t. Ultimately, we need to make sure they can get a learning environment that fits. In this case, an open and collaborative approach will let that happen. Do you think it will fly?
Tags: collabration, createthefuture, inquiry, projects, voicethread
My Experience Using Online Surveys by Zoomerang
By · CommentsWhat do our parents think about IST? How about the students? What are their thoughts about the way they learn and how they are assessed? Do we live up to our school philosophy? Do they like the lunch? As part of our CIS/WASC accreditation process, we want to know the answers to these questions and more. So we created two online surveys for our school community–one for parents and one for students. We opened and closed our parent survey in December a few days before the winter break. We opened the student survey to our DP students yesterday. We’ll ask the MYP students to take the survey by the end of this week. 
To build our surveys we purchases a pro subscription with Zoomerang. After building the surveys some weeks ago and organizing some of the results just yesterday, I have some thoughts about my first experience with online surveys in general and Zoomerang’s online survey tool.
Works for Me
It’s easy to build a complex survey with Zoomerang. You get an intuitive workspace with useful features. The duplicate feature, for example, trimmed a couple of hours off the total time (about four hours) it took me to build the first survey. It allowed me to duplicate a question with all of its formatting and paste it into the survey. I would then just need to revise the question. A great time saver! Otherwise, I would have to write the question and then format the response type over and over again (button, multiple answer, rating, open-ended, etc.). To check the look and functions, Zoomerang gives you an easy to use preview button for your survey.
There is a feature that allows us to direct people to certain questions based on their answers. If a parent indicates she only has children in the MYP program, then she is only given the MYP specific questions. Likewise, parents with DP students only see the DP questions. Creating this skip logic was kind of tricky because I had to consider three sets of questions (PYP, MYP, and DP) but once I got my head around the idea it was easy to do with Zoomerang’s Add a Skip feature at the bottom of each page.
A few other useful features… Zoomerang gives a wide selection of question types to choose from. However, we wanted more flexibility with the Comments feature. I’ll discuss that below. We could build customized intro and thank you pages easily. And once I had one survey created, I could use it as a template to create another one. I created the student survey this way by copying the parent survey. I still had to go in and revise the questions and skip logic, but this saved me the effort and time of setting up the all of the question and response formats. Another great time saver! For questions that are not open-ended, we can generate customized color charts and then download them or load them into a presentation. We haven’t used that feature yet, but it looks like a handy one for sharing the results.
Not So Good
We felt limited when building our question types. We wanted to provide a text box for additional comments into nearly every response. However, the only way I found to do this was by using a rating scale – matrix type question. It wasn’t our preferred question type but we found a way to make it work for us. You can see an example in the image above. I don’t like the look and feel of that layout. That line disrupts the flow and the buttons with numbers are repetitive. I would rank this low in readability but it got the job done.
Analyzing results did not turn out to be as easy as we had anticipated. We wanted to extrapolate and print individual responses but found no easy way to do this. It has to be done individually and each print job requires seven clicks. It’s a tedious and time consuming job. I was hoping for one button that would print out individual responses. There is a button that prints out an overview. That’s useful but we need more buttons like that which allow us to extrapolate specified data to print. As it is, we can get it done but it takes too much manual labor to be considered an efficient process.
Would I use Zoomerang again? Maybe. I’m pretty new at this and still I found the surveys easy to build. I didn’t use them but tutorials are readily available to learn more. When it comes time for another survey, I’m sure that I will look around for online surveys that allow for a wider use of a text box for additional comments and more granular control when it comes time to analyze survey results.
Tags: surveys
