I uploaded my students Henry VIII Biographies yesterday to the school website, and began thinking how great it would be to be able to embed an example or two here to share. The flash files were hosted already so there had to be a way of embedding them. Having played around for a bit, I have managed to meet my aim. Having borrowed some code from the Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta and "flash for blogger" following a bit of a fiddle, here are the results.
Now I am really excited about the further possibilities, this opens up for using 2create and 2 Create a Story. 2Create and 2Create a Story, both export to flash, can include embedded sound effects and animation, so with space to upload and host these files, inclusion to a blog space offers a new set of multimodal text publication possibilities. Am now pondering how we might do the same thing with the student's Wordpress blogs. Watch this space.
Post Script
After a visit to our y3 blog hosted by Ethink I have used the embed flash plugin to add one of the flash files created in 2 create a story to the blog. Can't wait to share this next term.
Cheating for the time being but responding to Anthony's Post. Last fire work season, I was out of the classroom and working with students across the school. Our Year 1 students used 2 create a story to develop firework stories. Some of the sound effects are not quite right, but the students really enjoyed, making their firework pictures, adding simple texts, animation effects from the library provided and adding background sound too. See what you think. In terms of my contribution to the challenge, I'll try to come up with something less obviously borrowed and special for later!!!
I have been a bit busy lately, but have been determined to grab some me time this weekend. Some space to blob out, get on blog and play with some of the tools I have been pointed to through shared links on del.icio.us. Thanks to John Sutton, for pointing out these two resources.
Soundsnap, A collection of free to use sound effects recorded by members of the Soundsnap community. These are suggested for use in podcast making, but could also be used in other Multimedia projects or Multimodal Authoring Activities, including animation or film making projects, PowerPoints, 2create and 2 create a story projects and PhotoStories.
Jing: In John's words, a "Great free screen recorder that records what you are doing on your pc. Has an instant share facility to embed in your blog, post a link in an instant messenger service." Will have a play with this one later, as looks really useful. There is also a version for the Mac. Check out this post on John's Blog calledSketchcasting is the New Podcasting?
I have been playing with Podium for the last couple of weeks on and off. Last week I posted about how one of my colleagues had used the tool with her year 4 class, and this week I have been working with year 3 to draft visual scripts.
Presenting orally to a group can be really difficult, and many adults find this diffficult being heavily dependent on written scripts, with the inevitable consequence that we tend to read our slides, rather than use them as prompts to innovate our presentation around, and the resultant "death By PowerPoint" scenario. Observing students using PowerPoint to talk to groups recently I have become increasingly aware of this as an issue, and is something with which I felt I needed to begin engaging. I decided to use visual scripts with the year 3s because I wanted them
to become familiar with the content they were to talk about
pick out highlights and significant events from their visit
rehearse and share their content as they wrote
to engage with the oral basis for the written text they were creating
have a scaffold upon which to hang their text development process
I know from experience that having a group of students in a whole class situation who are familiar with how to carry out a process is always really useful. So I began the process, by working with a small group to model how we transfer pictorial and writen text into an oral text format, through a "pre teaching" session. The Podcast file was very quickly set up in about 2-3 minutes. Working together we scripted the podcast using photos from their visit and the 2 create a story files we had been working on previously as prompts. We used the scripting tool to share out the story we were going to tell, and then as a group we rehearsed the script. This was a really interesting experience, and why I referred to PowerPoint above. The tendency from the students, naturally I guess, was to use the script as an autocue. They however began to read the text very mechanically. This lead to a brief discussion about how our listeners might respond. Was the way we were reading interesting to listen to? This was particularly pertinent as the students had become so concerned in the performance to say exactly what they had on the page, they had not made the link between their writing, speech and the listener. We quickly recorded one or two readers, and the children began to see that they were not using expression, and returning again to rehearse the script, they began to think about how they were saying things rather than what they were saying. This for me has particualr significance, when we are thinking about comprehension skills, where we want the students to begin inferring from content what might come next, or reading on using the "gist" to help. As we rehearsed some of the children began to make small improvisations on the script, while others, took their time and rehearsed the whole text object, but thinking about how they might say what they were reading. The outcome of this session is something I am really excited about, the students were initially very self conscious about the sound of their voices and their reading. We were working in the library today, and as the session went on the work they were doing began to attract increasing attention from other students, drawn to see what they were doing, and asking when or if they would be doing this. The interest expressed by other students made them feel special, and seemed to spur them on to improve what they were presenting. In under three quarters of an hour we had completed the task, and for a first attempt I am really pleased with the outcome, in addition I also have a group of children who will be able to help me out when others have to record their episodes and a model I can share with their classmates. I have also learned one or two lessons myself about the quirks of the software, and a few additional things I will need to think about when managing the process with small groups working independently with my new class next year.
Points to Note: Using the chapter tool to organise turn taking is still I think a really good idea, with emergent users, however what I didn't realise was that the script created was not for the whole episode, and each chapter needed to be scripted seperately. So next time, I will need to either encourage the children to record using the script to create a whole chapter, or encourage the children to create their script elsewhere and copy and paste sections into the individual chapter script windows. If you have used or have a copy of Podium perhaps you will try this out and see what I mean.
I also had some difficulties this evening uploading the podcast to our ftp space, and this is something I will have to explore further with my LA and technician, as I feel it probably has more to do with the firewall in school, than it does with the publishing process described. Eventually with a bit of playing around I managed to get the podcast so far published to a colleague's LA space, but this is not going to help in persuading my colleagues about how amazing this tool is. The learning benefits I have begun to notice this afternoon and from previous observed sessions, far outweigh the barriers that a few technical difficulties are currently causing, and I must get these resolved. If you are interested in having a listen, then here is the rss link for Y3's first report on their visit to the SS Great Britain. To subscribe to the feed, we are recommending to colleagues in school that they use iTunes as an aggregator, though some of you may use others such as Juice.
Subscribing to this podcast Using iTunes
click and drag to select the link and then copy it.
Open iTunes and in the advanced menu click subscribe to podcast, paste the link into the window that appears, then click OK. You may have to click the "get" or "refresh" buttons if the file doesn't download immediately, but we hope you enjoy, as much as we did. Why not pop by over the next few weeks and refresh iTunes to see if we have added other episodes.
Extra Year 6 talk about awareness week http://ictadvisory.bristol-cyps.org.uk/YEAR020707142809/rss.xml
I have been thoroughly impressed with 2 create a story, as you can probably see from the posts I have placed on my blog previously. I love that "Infant News Book" feel about the environment, which probably says something about my age.
I have been using 2 create a story recently with 2 age groups. Year 1 are using it to write "Fantasy Stories", as digital picture books. We are combining the teaching of basic graphic skills with the use of emergent writing, to tell stories from out of this world. I have enabled the full tool set, and we are focussing in on the use of specific graphic tools during each session. During the first session children had to design an alien, and could only use the shape form tols to do this, they were allowed to change colours they used. They then had to work with their partners to draft a sentence or two to describe it. During our second session again the tool choice was limited for the opening part of the session, as the children designed a planet for their alien to live on, but on completion they were introduced to the flood fill tool and spray can to finish the graphic, before again being asked to annotate this with descriptive sentences, involving shape and colour. An excellent resource or starting point on reflection for this activity might have been the picture book "I'm Coming To Get You," by Tony Ross. We had a lot of fun discussing what the sky around the planet might have in it, for example a cresent shaped moon, might have been a banana, the stars and other planets apples, and oranges, and the use of the spray can was used to model how we might achieve this effect. One student suggested the moon might be made of cheese, this lead off on one about how the other planets might be made of butter or bread. Where did butter and cheese come from, perhaps we could have a cow jump over or orbit the moon. We will be moving on to develop the story gradually over the next few sessions, and perhaps next week I should share "I'm coming to get you," as part of the session. The images developed are really helping the students to think about what they want to write, and it is interesting looking at the texts they are developing in response to see how their phonological awareness particularly has developed over the course of the year so far. One chap had worked so hard on his two page story draft I published it to the year 1 community pages on Thursday.
Year 3 will be creating podcasts, about their visits to The SS Great Britain, and as a practice run and drafting tool to introduce the idea of scripting and oral presentation, I have decided to use 2 create a story to develop visual scripts to support rehearsal of the process, by creating a photo supported text about their visit. This will give them the opportunity,
to create voiceovers to support their written and visual text,
to explore and discuss the effect that their voice over has on the reader,
to explore how we use the microphone as an input device,
and discuss the purpose expression as a device to maintain our reader's attention and interest.
These visual scripts will then be used to inform the chapter structure of the podcast I woul like them to develop in Podium. Each group presentation forming an episode that we can publish on completion to our Podium Webspace.
This term I am returning to Playing with Sound with Year 3. We were intending this to be developed in term one, and indeed we did some small group work using Garageband and the Mac, but whole class work was halted when we discovered many of our headphone sets were broken. Unfortunately previous budget spends meant we were unable to replace these and so plans had to be altered.
Instead of playing with sound in terms of composing we instead used sound in another way, and I opted to do this through multimedia authoring, exploring how we could find, download and attach or embed sound files to simple texts. As it turned out this had greater benefits during this, the first term, in raising student skill levels, not only in using the internet as a resource, as they learned how to download and save images and files, and navigate pages, but also in supporting the establishment of Online Classroom routines, and the "Cascade Saving" model I wanted to establish for students working together. For many of them logging on and navigating the local network was still a problem. The students were also expected to do something at this stage they all found problematic, engaging with the idea that when we come to the ICT suite we are here to extend classroom learning activities.
From what I have said in my blog so far, it is easy to assume, that this has always been the case, and that embedding ICT sessions in the day to day work of the students was a common approach. However this year has seen a radical shift in philosophy and approach to the idea of teaching and learning with ICT, rather than teaching ICT in isolation. Historically ICT has been more or less a bolt on to the curriculum provided. Once a week the students would go to the suite to be taught ICT skills through the allocated QCA or locally constructed Schemes of Work unit, often regardless of relevance to what was happening in class. This year however I have been engaged in a crusade to shift this viewpoint, and to contextualise what we are learning about ICT in the Online classroom within the wider classroom curriculum. Developing a foundation that sees students and teachers utilising this hour long space to prepare them to use and apply tools worked with during intersession tasks in ICT area activity within the clasroom, or to see classroom based activities as a preparation for extended use of the suite space to develop ICT based outcomes. This has not always been smooth sailing, and amid all the excitement around the progress students have made as ICT users, there is still some frustration regarding ownership of the ICT tasks students engage with. But this is another story.
Returning to playing with sound, the sequence of activities we eventually developed enabled us to begin establishing how we could reuse Internet based materials to support simple text development. In Music the children were talking about instruments from the orchestra and using the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's Music Room as a starting point, we explored together instrument families, downloaded shared collections of images, and soundfiles. We listened to samples together at the IWB (not the ideal solution, but the only one available at the time), and in pairs developed slides in Textease Presenter about some of the instruments we had discussed. The students learned how to insert images we had downloaded together, and to link soundfiles to their slides. They compiled simple texts about their instruments drawing on what we had read about them, revising and reviewing during shared times, and in the final week shared these shows with each other in the suite, and with their teachers in class.
As the above unit evolved, small groups and our LSA worked with Garageband on the Mac, to compose 30 second music samples with the students. The children thoroughly enjoyed this, as they were using loops, and composing what they saw as "real" music. I love Garageband, and have spent many hours "playing" with the software myself, to create "tunes." Within the interface, at the bottom of the screen you are provided with a bank/collection of sample loops, played on a variety of "real" instruments, some everyday, and some from the world of folk and roots, and sorted and grouped according to musical genre as well as instrument family. In the main window, are the tracks, into which the loops and samples can be dragged, when composing. There are indicators as to what key each loop is played in, to help make decisions when mixing. The potential for mathematical work is embedded within the timeline which runs across the track window, setting the time challenge meant children needed to consider when they would introduce the fade out in their track, and whether they would have a fade in. Being able to drag loops about meant thinking about what position in the track each loop would fit for the effect they were trying to create. The visual representation of the track, began to enable the students to see their sound file outcome as a layered image and to identify how the music tracks they listen to everyday, are composed as a texture of sounds. Completed tracks were exported to iTunes and then converetd to MP3 to be played on the computer, and compiled into a class CD, they could play on the CD player. Their LSA was also excited by what he had produced while exploring the software before using it with the students. The students enjoyed playing their CD in class during Golden Time, identifying the tunes they had composed, though I guess after a while the experience became less enjoyable for the adults around them, through repeated exposure. The tracks they produced were also provided for our Year 2 students to choose from for backing tracks to their BeeBot Boogy Videos, making the Year 3s composers for a real audience.
Web 2.0 has introduced a new way of "playing with sound," and this term I am intending to revisit aspects of this unit, as the children make podcasts with Podium about their class based topic work. We will again be taking a multimedia approach, using photographs and images as starting points and scaffolds for language development. We will use 2create a story, as a tool to develop material for web publication collected on school visits, but also to develop visual scripts for their podcasts, before working again in small groups to rehearse and share their news stories or documentaries for publication. I also want the students to use this material in their class Blogs and think spaces.
While recently updating our school website, reorganising the student project section about the new school being built here, I suddenly found myself thinking about how much the place had changed since I first began working here. I have worked here since I graduated, taking time out occasionally as professional development opportunities became available, but always being drawn back. Exploring the photos, and trying to recall and visualise what used to be here when I first arrived, it dawned on me that I was engaged in the kind of activity I would expect from students, engaging with images generally but akin to analysing data collected during a logging activity. Looking at the material collected by the school documentation group, and the blog being developed by our year 1 students currently I have found myself as a result thinking about what emergent data logging and analysis might look like in practice.
Data Logging is usually identified with Scientific activity, and associated with the use of Data Loggers and sensing devices, but has a broader application it seems to me, on reflection, in plotting and recording change over time. With younger students, loggers and their outputs are very abstract, but there may be other tools we can use to introduce the process in the Key Stage 1 and Foundation Classrooms, where observation is based on first hand experience using all senses.
Data Logging part of an observational process. Within the ICT curriculum it relies on the use of digital means to remotely collect and store of information (data) about events as they unfold over time. This data when presented visually either in real time or in retrospect allows us to draw on the evidence presented (usually graphically) to tell stories, identify patterns, draw inferences based on what we have observed (or Logged), to this end multimodally speaking, it might also be considered a literacy based process. Science one at Key Stage 1 sets out to promote student's observational skills gradually encouraging them to relate these, drawing simple conclusions and making predictions based on their observations and growing body of experiences. I am reminded here of a something which happened during my NQT year.
My first class were a family grouped year 1 and 2 group, and outside our classroom we had a large asphault surface, with a concrete wall around it (all of this has now gone). That summer it was very hot, and the windows and doors were constantly open. Outside we usually had at least one activity set up, and one week I set up the painting easels, and water tray for exploratory play. During One session there was a desperatation by all to go outside. I thought to begin with that this was down to the heat, but it turned out they were fascinated by something they had discovered. That morning a pair of children had taken a container of water from the water tray, a brush from the easel, and had begun painting pictures using water on the wall. Their pictures had mysteriously begun to disappear. Beginning at the top of the wall and working down, by the time they reached the bottom of the picture it had almost vanished. Not to be beaten by this they would go back and begin all over again, only to have the drawing disappear again. I had watched this intrigued by what they would do next, and as the day went on the children as a class became increasingly drawn into the phenomenon, and eventually came to ask if I knew where their pictures had gone? This was too good an opportunity to miss.
We sat down as a class to discuss their problem... To many of the class it seemed like magic, but as we talked and drew on their experiences, children began to suggest that perhaps the water had dripped off, it had soaked into the wall or it had gone up into the sky... We recorded their thoughts, and when the following day I "accidentaly" spilt the contents of the water tray, I asked them to predict what they thought would happen next. I had a feeling that morning, the day was going to be a bit strange, and so I had brought my camera with me. We went outside together with chalk and drew around the puddle I had made, taking photographs of the marks and shape that resulted. Every 30 minutes or so, a group of children were sent outside to record the puddle again and a photograph taken to record what had happened since the last time, this was repeated throughout the day.
Unfortunately in 1990 I didn't have a digital camera, and IT work was limited to borrowing the school's solitary BBC B for any work I wanted to do with the computer, immediacy of output meant a 24 hour wait, and collecting my photos from Tescos on the way into work. In class we looked at the images and discussed what we thought had happened. The puddle hadn't gone all at once, it had taken a while to disappear so what might be happening. The suggestion that the puddle had soaked into the playground was not really likely, as we might expect the pavement to be damp, it took nearly all day for the puddle to disappear completely, and this left lots of time for discussion, speculation and conjecture, as we huddled and grouped, hummed and haahed! I still feel this is one of my best ever science lessons. The children were completely sucked in, we made a class book using the photographs we had taken, telling the story of the "Mysterious Vanishing Puddle," with a host of possible conclusions, all written in the back by the children themselves, and drawing on the related observations we had made and logged over the course of that strange day. The children loved their book and would sit in small groups talking about it in the book corner and share it with visitors who arrived.
With the emergence of Digital Photography, combined with multimedia authoring and Web 2 environments, this type of activity now has enormously powerful potentials, not only with younger students but across the primary school, in supporting the telling of "stories of change" and "logging" learning or observational data from process based activities. Recent examples of this process in school include our Year 1 student bean diaries, Year 2 using their digital camera to record the development of eggs and chicks in a clasroom based incubator, photographically supported recounts using 2 create a story and powerpoint, and the use of comic strips and story boards to support the telling of stories based around events and school visits. Key Stage 2 Blogging activities and Web Site projects about the new school and Airbus Challenge also represent learning stories, using images to log change and development.
The use of tools such as digi blues and tuff cams, if seen as data logging devices and observational tools, enable this process to be placed in the hands of the students, using community activity and discussion to select approriate data and evidence from the sequence of events for inclusion in the emerging stories. From a scientific point of view the Digital Microscope and also time lapse videos such as this, borrowed from You Tube, might also provide similar opportunities to observe changes, which would raise health and safety concerns in the primary school, but which support Science Work on Microbes at Yr 6.
while the use of webcams set to capture images over time, satelite images showing moving weather fronts from space, and the use of meteorological data from websites also enable comparison to be made of local weather conditions with those in a remote location .
Have uploaded another three Wilbur Helps Outs to our School Website. These include an introduction to 2 Create a Story, Getting started with Bee-Botology and Part 1 of a guide to using the tools in Think.com.
If you have not used Think.com, and have wondered what the environment looks like behind the scenes, or how some of the basic tools work, then this is a chance to see.
I haven't embedded video to my Blog, before, so this is a bit of an adventure for me. I thought I'd give it a go with this particular entry to give a context to the sessions I have been developing, using digital writing frames with two different year groups in school this term. I also wanted to share how I have used the same digital text, to introduce and extend children's skills using mutimedia authoring tools, while supporting writing outcomes. The video I have been using, and which is embedded below, is the computer generated, animated short "Bert," created by Moonsung Lee.
My Sequence For Reading This Video As I have spoken about in previous posts, I have been using video data to inform my classroom research project, and this has in turn begun to inform the way I use Video snippets and short films with my students as literate objects. Video as a text presents meaning in several modes, and sessions involving video require us to engage with these as we do others. With written texts we engage with them on a word, sentence and text level, with a video I tend to view them on a visual, aural and whole text level. To begin the unit we spent time "watching" the film in different ways:
I minimised the movie, and we listened to the soundtrack. Bert is great as it has no dialogue, there are lots of sound effects to listen for, and a jaunty score which changes to reflect mood. Every now and again I would stop the film, and encourage the students to discuss firstly in pairs and then as a class what could be heard and to infer what they thought was happening from the clues they could hear.
I muted the sound, and we watched the movie as a series of moving pictures, pausing the film at approximately the same points as before, cueing the children to recall the sounds they had heard in a particular section, and focussing on the actions, the facial and physical gestures of the characters. Using these to devleop inferences about feeling, and to predict actions that might happen next.
We watched the movie with sound and pictures together, and spent some time rehearsing and retelling the story orally before beginning our own versions of the story.Preparing To Write.I have a copy of Bert in MPEG format, and have used this previously to support narrative writing and recount in the literacy hour. For previous table top units of work, I created and used Smart Notebooks with drag and drop storyboards, to support sequencing and oral storytelling.
To create the Notebooks Quick Time Pro was used, to capture significant scenes from the film and to save these as image files. These images were inserted within the Notebooks, to support sequencing and discussion of how the story unfolded. Images of characters, featuring facial expressions and gestures, were also used as prompts to support discussions about feelings or why characters might be behaving as they were. To some images I added thought bubbles and speech bubbles, and using "pair and share" or "talking twos" used small drywipe whiteboards to encourage discussion and suggestions about what the characters might be thinking or saying. Since the film is without dialogue use of images such as these out of sequence, also enables revisits to predictive tasks from previous sessions. What happened before this? What happened next? and facilitates the use of inferencial skills to consider why characters might be doing or saying what they are, drawing on the visual cues and the student's sense of events drawn from the aural and visual evidence within the film itself.
From this immersive work, I went on to develop student's own versions of the story through collaborative storyboarding and comic strip type activities. The Writing outcome initially being to orally retell, using images their versions of the story to the class. This immersive approach I found worked particularly well with struggling writers, who were able to use the visual narrative to support their independent work later.
The last time I used this movie was with a group of reluctant writers, and students who had significant literacy difficulties. Our unit's final outcome was based onscreen, and used images captured from the movie in MS PowerPoint, as writing prompts to support creation of a picture book for younger students. This term I have developed the unit to become two multimedia text units one at key stage 1 and the other in Key Stage 2.
Extending This To Develop Onscreen Multimedia Texts
This term I have drawn on the activities above to develop familiarity with the story, but have used the images captured previously to create digital writing frames.
In Year 2, I was asked to use a unit originally about graphics and text to support the student's understanding of features of recount writing. We have been using 2 simple's 2 create a story, and Bert as a context to support this. Before we began the onscreen writing task, the children helped me to choose 8 images from the movie and 2 create a writing frame, inserting the images before saving the file to the network. The children then worked in pairs, opening the shared frame and drafted their texts on screen, using the images as writing prompts. On completion of their writing the children were encouraged to think about what they had written and choose animation effects for their images that would help support the story they were trying to tell. Finally they were asked to add sound effects to the page that would add to the feelings of the characters and action within their story. I have published the first completed text to the school website.
In year 5 we are extending their experience of digital texts by writing a digital story book for younger children, using PowerPoint. The story is much longer, and as well as using images from the film, they are inserting action buttons to enable their readers to navigate the story on screen. We have turned off the onclick default setting for slide movement, which means that the strories they produce will function very much like a CD ROM story in slide show view. Some of the students have asked if they will be able to include sound effects, as the CD ROMS they have used often jingle when pages are turned, and also about the possibilities for having their story read to their audience, or hiding sounds or actions in the pictures. These types of questions I find particularly exciting as they reflect an awareness of the creative potentials of ICTs in the classroom, which we may overlook. They reflect student knowledge and experiences of digital technologies, experiences we tend not to utilise or draw on in our need to teach particular skills, or perhaps because they are beyond our personal experience. They also reflect a move I actively encourage, the "how do I get the computer to do this, rather than what can I do with the computer today" approach we often see in classrooms. We discussed how we might be able to achieve some of these, but time is an issue here, though I really would like them to have the opportunity to build on this interest and the excitement and sense of achievement I am sure it will generate. I had planned to insert page turn sound effects, and am considering how we might insert hyperlink effects through image hotspots. We also have the software environments available that would enable the students to create self made sound files to read the stories through action buttons (and on mouseover), in the form of Podium and Audacity, this however will mean the children needing to work in small groups to create these. Watch this space for further developments.
Have just spent a couple of really good fun days helping a member of our support team get some really exciting things out of 2 Create a Story. It never ceases to amaze me just what this tool can do. We haven't quite finished, but I think this is probably my fault not bringing the right file home with me, but what amazed me was seeing the real sense of achievement when the work was done, and the surprise at what was possible using this apparently simple kit as a multimedia authoring platform.
I had this idea a few years ago of building a zoomable website which would enable students to navigate the globe, zooming in and out of places they were studying and adding information, or uploading postcards and images people sent from their holidays. This became a bit more realisable after visiting world atlas.com and took initial shape during a geography focussed book week when we used Where's Wally? as a context for a whole school project. When our Key Stage One Students adopted Tizz The Bear as character to roam the globe with them early in the Spring Term, this seemed too good an opportunity to miss to play with and develop this idea even further. As students have been covering geographical topics I have tried to encourage them and their teachers to contribute material they develop to this space. This hasn't always been as successful as I would like, but the aspect which is now just starting to take off, is the idea of travel logs, and sending postcards to school from Tizz. 2 Create a Story with the ability to save files in swf format, may just be that additional catalyst I have been looking for.
My colleague, spent the morning with me and a group of year 2 students, while we prepared a writing frame together using screen captured images from a video. She had originally decided to use PowerPoint, to present her version of Tizz's Travel Log, but having seen how easily this tool enabled the students to build image supported texts, create animation effects and to use sound files, she decided this might be the tool to help her get the best from the materials she had.
Using teacher the options we have set up the software to give access to the full set of drawing tools, and this also enables on right click a file import, copy and paste option on a pop up menu in the drawing space. So to set up her travel log, she firstly imported each of the image files she wanted to use, sequencing these to tell her story as she went. In the writing space she added supporting text, before moving to add her animation and sound effects. When you are in the flow, confidence is growing with a piece of software and you have identified a purpose for what you require it is amazing how adventurous you can get and to what lengths you are prepared to go to achieve this. You cannot really imagine a visit to spain without the appropriate music, and in her final slide, as Tizz reclines on his last day, she decided she needed some Spanish Music. This was not available in the sound effects so we needed to aquire some. She had brought along a CD, and with a bit of playing around we used Media Player to extract the track she wanted to use in .wav format. Using Audacity, she spent some time trimming and cropping her file to extract about 10 seconds from the file, before saving it. Using the import a file option in the sound effects menu, she then attached the sound file to the page. To say that she had never used either piece of software before, the outcome was amazing, and from her point of view unexpected. This also, again demonstrates just how powerful this tool could be as a multimodal resource in the hands of young children, with teacher preparation, and student access to, collections of theme based images and additional sound files.
Combined with a zoomable and tagged map created at Quickmaps.com, this document is currently displayed on Tizz's Travels, on our school web site. As I said above, I think I brought the wrong swf file home with me this evening, and so will need to update these pages tomorrow to gain the full effect. Well Done Ms C. I am sure others will be inspired to follow in your footsteps...
It was food week, Year 2 were exploring how they navigate internet pages, and comparing life in their current location with that on St Lucia. It can be very easy for students to begin seeing the internet as a play space and not an information source, so from the very beginning of this unit, simple web quests had been built in to our sessions together. The sites we were to use had also been preselected, and linked to our school community pages. Initially they involved students in locating pictures or key words in simplified online texts such as those to be found at schooltrain, but later involved labelling maps from online and CD based atlases, which share many of the features with a web page.
Learning how to navigate and locate information on the web is fine but the next stage is actually learning that we can do stuff with it. In this case we began with the Oxfam Cool Planet Website,
and their Bonkers about Bananas pages. Using these as a starting point, we discussed the origins of Bananas and the processes involved in harvesting them and transporting them from the Windward Islands to the Supermarket and how all this had to happen before the tasty yellow fruit ends up in our lunchbox. The photographs on the site are excellent, and break the process down, as well as providing a map which locates the islands and texts which support discussions about Fair Trade and the lives of banana farmers.
In this session we opened 2 create a Story, and using the teacher options I enabled the full toolset view. With the children at the Interactive whiteboard, we set up a writing frame, by copying the images of the process from the approriate web pages, and pasting them to the image box at the top of each page in the writing frame we were creating. On completion of the process we watched the slideshow, and discussed what text we might add to support our readers in understanding the journey of a banana. We saved the file to the shared space on the network and the children were asked to work in pairs to find, open and begin writing their story of the journey of the banana.
As mentioned in a previous post I introduced pictorial folders to our network in September, and these 6 and 7 year olds have learned through regular practice, how to log on, and how to find their work independently. One or two students still find this a bit of a problem, but most can not only open files they have saved, but are beginning to cascade save their work, adding numbers to redrafts and edits. This has obvious benefits for assessment for learning practices, and in enabling them to go back to previous work, if they make mistakes. The outcomes of the activity was developed over two sessions, the pictorial support structure within the texts enabling them to develop continuity in their work from one session to the next, and in some cases to go back and reread, check and make simple revisions to the texts they had input previously. In the final stages before publication the students were encouraged to recolour their slides, and fonts to make them readable, and to input animation and slide transition effects from the menu. Discussing this first, and the effects we might choose, the students were very choosy about which would bring about the effects they wanted. For example, swinging bananas in trees were given a rocking animation, bananas from the supermarket, were sent spinning or exploding into the shpopping basket, and processes were often faded in or faded out of the frame. Review during the plenary session of the purposes of the animation effects chosen, yielded good reasons for the effects the pairs had chosen. These documents were so exciting, that over the next couple of weeks, I will be including them in Flash format in a gallery on the school website. In the mean time the students have moved a long way from September when they required everything they produced to be printed out, and instead were really excited at the possibility of sharing their work with their class teachers in class on the IWB or through the website, realising the animation effects they had chosen would be missing from any paper based work. This has very exciting possibilities for the view of publishing that these students are beginning to develop. It will be interesting, with the introduction of class Blogs, developments of the school website and the introduction of a VLE, to see just how much of the "textual" work these students develop in the future will be promoted and displayed by them in digital format.
Having read Keith's Post about 2 create a Story (2cs), I was reminded of some minor issues I encountered when I first tried to export to flash from the software. I love 2cs as a tool , and am not sure if my issue was a bug within the software at the time or whether it was a by-product of the way it had been installed on our system.
What would happen is when I exported as .swf, the software would create a .2cs file instead. This file could not subsequently be opened in 2 create a story or in flash player, I tried renaming it's file extension to .swf, and this then solved the problem enabling the file to be played in flash player, and to be inserted in my web pages. If you encounter this problem, and feel comfortable with trying out this process, then the Fix I used goes like this.
Follow the save process from 2cs as usual, in the file types box selecting export as flash.
Close 2cs and open windows explorer. Browse for the location where you saved the file.
In the tools menu select folder options and then the view tab.
Scroll down and ensure the hide extensions for known file types box is unticked. Press the apply button, and then ok. All files should appear with their name followed by their extension (eg .htm or .2cs)
Select the file you have just saved, and then right click to rename.
replace the .2cs extension with .swf.
Double click to open the file in flash player.
If this doesn't work, then rename the file with the .2cs extension, and seek advice from 2 simple.
In more recent versions of the software this problem doesn't seem to happen, 2simple I have found are a very approachable company, and having visited their website the other day before writing this, you might rather prefer to call them if you encounter this difficulty, to seek a version upgrade. In the meantime I hope this might be a helpful stop gap.
