Adding the National Geographic Photo of the Day widget to my Google Desktop and blog has been a real winner in terms of personal inspiration and as a creative spark over the last couple of years. Usually the images lead me to Language and Literacy ideas, but this image from the 6/5/10 set me thinking about a possible context and and alternative in to working using LOGO with our older Phase 2 students next term.
In previous posts I have explored the use of MSWLOGO a freeware tool and MS Paint within the context of the Mathematics classroom, developing ideas around the properties of shape, rotational symmetry and patterning, but using this image as a starting point and available design for the journey, what would happen if... this was extended to explore tessellation and repeated patterning, using copy and paste processes?
Friday's are great with my timetable including a day with one of our younger Phase 2 classes. The students all aged between 6 and 8 are Year 2 and 3 and a lively group. Their day with me includes a focussed reading session, which for the last couple of weeks has involved using activities to investigate spelling and reading texts and words including the phonemes they have been working on during the week. To help with this I have begun collecting images from the web, that we can use as a starting point for the sessions.
Some of the phoneme groups I still think are a little obscure, and image collections not easy to compile. This week for example we have been looking at the various graphemes that can be used to represent /er/. The collection included things like ferns, birds, a teacher, a winner who came first in a race, a collection of words, a Whirlwind and screen capture of a wordsearch.
The images were used as an introduction to the session, and as a way of re-engaging the students in listening for the sounds they had been learning about, or thinking about what each image might represent within the rhyming groups they were working on. In addition however the images were also selected to support engagement with the main task, which was to work in pairs on a "phoneme Spotter" activity before sorting and grouping the words according to the graphemes they contained. I was concerned that some of the words might be unfamiliar to some students, and hence the choice of a fern, though the choice of some images as visual metaphors, such as a flame for burn was also interesting allowing discussion of what fire or flame might have to do with the /er/ sound we were working on.
Previously I have printed or copied the phoneme spotters we are going to use to a smart board notebook, to act as a shared read before asking students to find and code words. For some reason I decided last week to present the spotter covered by a layer of digital ink, and to make it into a "rub amd reveal" activity. The students loved it, and were completely captured as the IWB eraser was dragged across the text slowly revealing the text a word or sentence/phrase at a time. "It's magic!" seemed to be the common consensus, and the looks on the student's faces who had obviously not seen this before was great. This week when I was passing the class I was asked if I would be making the computer write stories again. Moments like this are the kind of thing we live for and I was happy to oblige.
What was really interesting today was though that element of "magic" remained, the students were now anticipating the text appearing and began to read along with the rubber as the text was revealed. This offered some interesting opportunities to begin playing with the text,
skipping on and revealing words later in the text while leaving others preceding it hidden. Discussing what might still be hidden under the ink before revealing this and testing our predictions.
Stopping to ask what might come next, before reading and checking our predictions
revealing a few letters or a few words from the next sentence and asking what might appear next.
Revealing the initial phonemes and final phonemes and asking which grapheme or sound picture will be under the ink to spell the word we were reading.
Putting the "magic" aside for the moment, engagement with the text in this way prior to the spotter activity, improved student familiarity with it, while the use of the images to begin meant some of the stranger vocabulary had been introduced. In pairs I asked them to use their own versions of the text to identify the words that contained the /er/ graphemes or sound pictures, and then pulling the group together we began identifying how the /er/ sound could be written and where each grapheme usually appeared in words.
After this, the students were asked to test our ideas and generalisations by soritng the words they had found in a table. The group was pulled together again for a final review with a "drag and drop" version of the table top task used to sort the words as a class and check against the work we had done. While discussing how well our generalisations worked. E.g did "ir" always go in the middle of words, and "er" always come at the end. From the examples we had the rules seemed to work pretty well, even though I did introduce at least one example from our photos that didn't match, eg shirt, first, girl and bird followed our rule, but the fir tree didn't, however as a rule of thumb it worked pretty well.
I'm sure for many colleagues the structure of this session is more than familiar, however for me what was interesting was
How use of "Phonic Photos" or text related images helped re-engage the students with phoneme and grapheme groups introduced and even though metaphorical in nature how some of these prompted discussion and inferential work, while also helping introduce visually, unfamiliar vocabulary
How introducing the spotter as a whole class shared text, and in a slightly different way, using digital ink and rub to reveal techniques opened possibilities to engage students with higher order reading skills such as prediction and deduction based around an accesible and manageable text chunk
How student response and motvation seemed to increase through the "magic" created by a relatively simple extension of a previous task by the addition of digital ink and use of the rub and reveal technique.
" I love this idea From Jason Powell pointed out by a colleague on Twitter. In previous posts I have reflected and waxed about how we might use historical images to investigate, locate, discuss and compare modern scenes within a given location. This use of digital photography to embed the past within the modern scene however is a really interesting idea. I like the way the historical landscape is not removed from the scene, but used as integral to it and fits like a missing piece from a jigsaw puzzle. Just pondering how this type of image composition process might be used as part of a digital photography project. How practical it might be to embed it in field trips or orientering type activity.
Being a bit of a Pink Floyd fan, and ambling off track a little as usual, seeing these images and a recent tweat around using ICT to support art projects reminded me of a small scale project with some students a while back using a trial version of Serif Photoplus I picked up at a conference. The project involved creating images in the style of Magritte.
Downloaded scans of paintings from the Internet were used initialy to create template files and masks, where for example in this image the landscape was removed. The painting and window used to form a framing layer. The students used digital cameras to capture views and images from around school including landscapes and objects captured from unsual angles.
Once downloaded to the computer the children chose a frame for their image, and applied filter effects to their own images, before inserting these to the template, and exporting these as jpegs. This video presentation contains the student outcomes from this activity.
Within the National Primary Framework for Literacy there are number of references to using graphic manipulation to apply effects to images either in response to texts or in support of composition through the creation of scenes and settings. Some of these images particularly the landscapes make for strange viewing.
A number of Magritte's images make great starting points for discussion generally, but would also make brilliant talk for writing prompts in developing openers and links to the weird and wonderful in narrative units such as those associated with Fantasy and Strange World Settings. Here are a couple that set my mind a whirring.
We have been preparing material for our celebration assembly for parents. This has included compiling from our collection of photographs; a series of video montages. The tool of chioice for this has been Microsoft Photostory a flexible and easy to use tool, that I have used many times with students to compile for web display, graphic work carried out in class based ICT sessions.
Today a suggestion was made by the students that we use some of the images form our story telling sessions about Grace Darling to form a backdrop to part of the show. I instead asked a group of students to help me script a voice over, and had a student volunteer to record it in Podcast Voice with a partner. The following is their outcome.
The students who finally recorded and presented the story, did a cracking job as you can see and hear, but today, as with their other written forms, were encouraged to save some of their errors and bloopers. Clips from the cutting room floor are often used in shows such as "It'll be alright on the night" and "bloopers" are also often selected from movies in the making for inclusion on DVDs. They humorously show how even the most professional of us can sometimes get things wrong.
Today was a real treat when the students shared not only their "finished" product, but also their "blooper Clips." It seems that our narrator had a particular problem with one of the worms... words, eventually giving up on it to use another she felt was less of a tongue twister. It takes an amazing amount of self confidence to share these kind of mistakes, and is a sign of the maturity and self assurance that this group is developing through the use of Multimodal tools such as this. They are definitely moving beyond the self concious and developing a greater audience awareness. The safety they felt as "broadcasters" today was also evident in their willingness to share discuss and laugh along with their friends at the difficulties they had encountered and demonstrating how they had revised and edited, rerecorded tracks to produce the outcome they were seeking. A huge well done, thanks and tumultuous applause to both R and T for a job well done.
" Thanks to Steve from Wiltshire LA, for this "Nugget." A collection of interactivities, teacher's notes, web and IWB resources, based around historical images. A swift play myself, and I found some great starting points for talk and guided investigational work; using images as both primary and secondary sources. Our History theme this term is on the Victorians, and there is a host of material to support this. Using images as secondary sources, there are also materials on the Tudors, castles, the Romans and other common themes, and subthemes. A site to come back to and definitely one to share with colleagues.
Thanks to John at Creative ICT for directing me to this really nice online comic strip creator. Called Comiqs, the environment is much more flexible than others I have visited, and mentioned so far, and in many ways is Comic Life Like, in how it is presented and works.
Within Comiqs, you can search for flickr images or upload your own photos and doodles to use, add additional pages and choose from a variety of page layouts and templates. Using the tools and uploaded images in your comic strip is a matter of dragging them from the palette space to the left of the screen, onto the work space where they can be resized and moved around. The Graphic tab, is where the page layouts can be found along with a collection of call outs and the caption box. Dragging these to the workspace and double clicking allows text to be added. To make my playtime easier and shorter I copied text from a file of Homerisms I already had, and pasted these to the bubbles. Not greatly creative on my part, but I did do a little something more with this one.
Completed comics can be saved to your personal space and then embedded in the slide show format below to your blog or webspace using provided embed code.
I am a big fan of comic strips, their potential as multimodal learning and literacy tools. Comic Life mentioned above and in several other posts, is a local application available for both PC and Mac. It has helped I and my students to write classroom learning stories, and played a key role as a data analysis and presentation tool, helping make sense of interactions in classroom based Video Data collected for my research project. This environment I think is amazing in that it utilises similar affordances and tools, as a web based environment, allowing direct sharing of content to the web, via other web2.0 services. I will certainly be considering how I can use this space with my students to support our blogging adventures, but without losing touch with Comic Life for other things. Having just visited the plasq site, I was interested to find the latest incarnation of Comic Life, Magiq, and to see versions of the tool now available for the iPhone and iTouch. Unfortunately Comic Life magiq is only available for the Mac, but I've embedded the video here for those who might be interested.
We have been sharing adventure stories and traditional tales with a twist, during Literacy Sessions for the last couple of weeks, and this week we have particualrly focussed on another of my favourites The Paper Bag Princess, By Robert N. Munsch.
My students seem to really enjoy, my taking a story I love and then trying to retell it in my own words. Perhaps this has come from the podcasting work we have done and their appreciation of how challenging this can be for them at times, or perhaps it simply comes from watching and listening as I try to recount and embellish the tales going through the mental processes I expect of them, visualising, mentally rehearsing and then retelling the tales as they develop. Hopefully though it is also because they recognise the magic of ideas. A story although in existence can still be reshaped, reformed, and refined in the mind of the teller. Even great stories and books such as this are made and altered through performance and enhanced by our interpretations and imaginings. This story telling process however I feel closely models and mirrors the path I currently using in encouraging the talking for writing process. Multimodal views of literacy see written text as "oral text," a symbolic permanent or semi permanant record of what it is we want to say or wish others to hear. Maybe as experienced writers this is something we have lost sight of in the teaching of writing. How many times do we say to ourselves, "hang on that doesn't sound right!" Perhaps we have forgotten over time that the voice we hear, and link to our actions as writers, took years not only to perfect but also to internalise. A forgotten part of our writing repertoire, however this is something which in the primary sector particularly many of our students are either only beginning with or are still in the process of developing. It took an introductory course in Semiotics, communication and representation recently, to actually challenge my perceptions and help me to realise just how complex this process must be. It was great this week then, when the students having eventually read The Paper Bag Princess themselves for the first time, to hear expressions about how they had already read this story, not heard it as I might have expected, and beginning I hope to make the link even if inadvertently between the spoken word and written text they were engaged with.
Over the last couple of days the students have begun to move on from the reading process to begin talking together, planning, mapping out and rehearsing potential plot elements for their own versions of the story. We have discussed and collected new titles for the story to help us innovate on the text, these include such barnstormers as; The Trash Can Princess, The Wheely Binbag Princess and so on, all of which have potential to influence the reactions of other characters in the story, and effect closing dialogue between the princess and the kidnapped prince charming she sets out to rescue. In the process the children have also created some fabulous story maps, and it is these that have prompted this post.
Stimulated by the discussion which began to emerge from the class and the quality of the illustrations the children generated around the story, I have decided to trial something a little bit different in tandem with the story writing process itself. We often use role play and freeze framing as part of our talk for writing process and in a previous post I talked about how interesting it might be to use elements of the Commoncraft approach to animation to support visual storytelling. Having watched the recent release of the Indiana Jones trilogy that featured some really great animated storyboards, I was really fired up to have a go at using this to frame my in to the process. This week we began making scenery and cutout characters, to support the idea of multimedia storyboarding. I am hoping this will inspire the children and help with rehearsing story sequence, something one or two are still finding difficulty with. The idea revolves around using the scenery and character cutouts to frame scenes from the story, capturing these as digital photographs and then using Photostory to sequence the scenes and events. From here I would like the children to add voice overs to tell the story with completed outcomes for publication as simple group movies.
For my more able students I hope this will help extend and expand their vocabulary use and help with the text revision process as they write, while for others, some who are still reluctant to record, or having problems in maintaining logical sequencing as they move from plot element to plot element, that this visual and oral story prompt will help scaffold their progression through the story events they want to tell.
Wanted to share a nice activity that we worked on in class today. Our theme is based around being a Bristolian, and last week we identified some of the student's and our favourite places in the city, charting these and creating a simple postcard.
Using the landmarks the students had identified, we compiled a collection of labeled digital photographs, printing them out to use with a tourist map in this group challenge. The following learning story, was compiled in Microsoft Photostory, and uploaded to Google video for sharing.
This term my students have been working on a Geography Theme around their local area, that lead as an aside to a number of post on using Quikmaps. My curiosity about how to tag images in this environment emerged from work I was doing with the class anyway, using digital images to map our locality, firstly on paper and alongside this using 2 create by 2 simple to develop a simple zoomable atlas.
The project began as a means of supporting understanding of their place in the world. Our starting point was on the amazing worldatlas.com website, where students were encouraged to explore the site by gradually zooming into the UK, saving copies of maps from their journey through the website as they went. These images were saved locally to their home drives for use as the project developed, and included
A World Map
A Map of Europe
A Map of the UK
A Map of England
and A Map of Bristol
The final map they needed for the project, showing the school and our environs was a Quickmap, that I developed for and with them, showing the route of a walk we took around school, to which I tagged, photographs taken by the students on their walk, for display on the school website, and use in a small video project about our favourite places.
With these images stored, the students used 2 create to make an initial 6 slide show, and on each slide they placed the the maps in "zoom order." The next stage was to use buttons to locate the zoom point for the map, a button being placed on Our home continent, The UK, England, Bristol and so on.
Right clicking on the buttons, actions were added that hyperlinked each location to the map associated with it, so clicking on the Europe button would take us to a slide with a map of Europe on it, Clicking the UK button there would take us to a map of the UK and so on, until we eventually arrived in Bristol. On the Bristol map a button was added to take us to another slide yet to be created where the aerial photo developed in Quikmaps would be located.
Getting the aerial photo we had made in Quikmaps was achieved by making a screen print. With the Quikmap in the web browser window, the print screen key was pressed, then in a graphics package, this image was pasted and cropped, before being saved to a shared folder for the students to use in their projects.
For the next stage of the project all of the photographs taken by the students on our walk, and during subsequent activities about our favourite places in school were copied to a shared folder alongside the quikmap as a shared resource for the remainder of the project. The students then inserted the quikmap image to their 6th slide. In their groups they decided which of the images they would like to use in their project and added additional slides to accommodate them.
With the Quikmap inserted, and their chosen photographs added to the additional slides, they then set about linking each photograph to its location, inserting multiple buttons to the quikmap, using place holder pins as reference points that enabled them to think about where each location was in relation to the others. On the photoslides adding backlinks the map enabled the document to become a kind of virtual tour too, as the reader is directed to return to look at other locations they have photographed.
The whole process has been incredibly exciting. The use of talk throughout, has facilitated through discussion the use of subject specific vocabulary in context, we have used maps to begin engaging with the scalability of the world from landmass and ocean, to continent, country city or town and region. Within our locality we have used maps to find and estimate position of place in relation to others, as well as to help observe features of our place in space. As an active mapping project the children have not only experienced a diverse and challenging set of ICT skills, but they have used these practically to consolidate geographical concepts moving from a global position to hands on mapping of their own locality. I will hope to share some of these projects, by exporting the projects to Flash, and embedding these for exploration on the school website soon, alongside the video project which is emerging using photographs to talk about our favourite places.
The Common craft Show, published by Lee and Sachi LeFever, has really helped me understand some of the principles and ideas I found tricky to explain to friends and colleagues, particularly blogs and wikis, and the principles behind RSS Feeds. During the Summer I was drawn into the "Twitterverse," following friends and fellow bloggers in between posts. An "enthusiastic lurker" perhaps more than a proactive participant, but nonetheless Twitter as a tool has fascinated me, like so many environments in the web2.0 world in terms of its hidden or not quite yet discovered potentials. It has among other things been used to facilitate audience participation at a number of conferences I have attended lately, through live publishing of comments and questions among other things during presentations and events, so when in my feeds and tweats I found the folk @ Commoncraft had made a video about Twitter, how it worked and how it was useful, I was quick to take a look.
This post is not about Twitter actually, sorry... Its more about the "CommonCraft" style and approach, and the additional videos I found in the catologue after watching the Twitter video and the inspiration that they evoked around the potential of this style of presentation for use in the classroom. As you can see the video presentation is chatty, friendly and I think enormously appealing. The professional homemade look and feel, I think lends them beautifully to a genre and style of animation and presentation that could be readily adapted and used to develop multimodal writing outcomes with students in the classroom.
My experiences with students, tell me how challenging amid the excitement of making a film students find taking time to frame shots, waiting for that hand to get out of the frame. It is usually not until the finished product, as they see it, is aired, that groans emerge about the hand in frame that shouldn't have been their. While watching the Commoncraft Show again this week, I have begun thinking about how often my intentions and desired outcomes may overcomplicate what is neccesary to enable the technology to fulfill its roles in class based animation activities. The students are usually happy with the work they make, and the outcomes they achieve excite and motivate them. I began wondering just how important in using audio and video as a writing medium it really is for students to be hindered by the issue of "hands in" productions. We all want quality outcomes to result from the work our students develop, but perhaps the question I have missed when thinking about animation projects in the classroom is why we were really doing them. What purpose will they serve? For me animation is about multimodal communication and storytelling, so maybe if this is what I want to achieve, then I should review this side of the process rather than dwelling on the technical aspects too much. Disney, Pixar and Aardman's animators, spend years honing their skills, and hours/months planning the outcomes and making the sets and environments in which they will set their stories. Perhaps their are other ways to develop situations where emergent learners can develop their understanding of the elements that make up the audio visual storytelling process. Ways that enable them to tell stories while they engage with and explore the nuances of the media and tools involved, and this is where the Common craft show came into my thinking.
I made some films with students in Y4 last year using the Stop Motion Process, and Stick Puppets to tell the story of the Ramayana. The project was split into scenes that we storyboarded in class and which the students went on to use in small groups to recount and tell different parts of the story as short stop motion clips. Their completed group video clips were later compiled as a class movie, by editing together on the IWB in Movie Maker. Communicating beyond the visual however was something the students found difficult to reconcile, and to support their story most drew on the familiar comic strip genre, including speech bubbles and captions to support their narrative. Because of our limited experiences at the time, time limitations for the projects and student eagerness to complete their work, the text elements were displayed for too short a time for their audience to see and appreciate them, but the idea was their. Animation as a storytelling process is incredibly complex, requiring more than the skills and knowledge of how to achieve motion, though in the emergent stages I think this is what the students find most exciting and appealing, the bringing to life of static and inanimate objects. While watching the Common Craft Show what struck me as powerful, was what might have happened if we had actually seen the video creation process as a digital writing outcome. Like "The Common Craft Show" this project used paper based hand drawn and screen printed cut outs. I have begun to ponder on how a "Common Craft" type approach, combining talk with the props we had developed as the "writing outcome" may have enabled text rehearsal and the bringing of these objects to life as a visual narrative.
A common craft type approach to using video and animation in the classroom seems to offer a powerful pedagogical tool, for linking some of the ideas I have explored in previous posts around multimodality and literacy development. Check out this description from The Commoncraft Blog where Lee describes
"How the workflow breaks down:
I create the first draft of the script and basic storyboard, we review it
We both edit the script, often concurrently using Google docs.
I create the illustrations
We walk through the storyboard and script together
In the studio, Sachi runs the camera and effects (animation/stop-action) and I direct the story
Sachi does all the video editing/finishing
I blog about it
In terms of our views of literacy and the writing process, what does this reveal about the complexities of digital text authoring. This reflects the complexities of a process based outcome, What Lies Beneath this situation, far outweighs the apparent simplicity of the outcome. Planning, drafting, , reworking/editing/revising, rehearsing, performing, evaluating, before re-editing, revision and publication; and throughout... Collaborating.
The process of oral storytelling, storyboarding and talk for writing we have begun to develop in support of "podcasting" seems very similar. Many of the materials the students develop to do this never see the light of day beyond the planning stage. Using this whiteboard based visual storytelling medium and process would I'm sure not only be really good fun but an interesting way to blend and evidence the role of talk for writing through practical activity and outcome. The added bonus is that using this medium as the writing outcome, we have courtesy of Common Craft a number of ready made models of the text form to draw on, share, evaluate and work with as a frame to hang the text development process on.
As a final soundbite, how about this project or one like it to link ideas from a science or geography project through ICT and an extended Literacy unit. How would you classify it? Is it a non chronological report, an explanatory or a Persuasive Text or does it encompass elements of all three?
How could we use this tool to enable students in taking ownership of and sharing their conceptual models or in bringing concept cartoons to life, perhaps using the process to explain pollination, photosynthesis or condensation? What about creating a set of instructions? Could we use the process to tell stories drawing on storyboards as writing media in their own right, with cut out characters and voice overs using digiblues. This would also be relatively easy to accomplish using digital cameras/ scanners and PhotoStory. How about using IWB presentations, capturing video through the smartboard recorder, with students adding narration through tools such as Movie Maker. The smartboard software could be installed for use as an application suite for this purpose on machines not attached to the whiteboard. This as you can tell has really got me thinking. What do you think?
Having spent a good part of last week playing with Quikmaps, and getting really excited by the possibilities that attaching photographs to place marks provided, I have been pondering on a comment left by Tom, around tagging other media to place marks, and how this might be used with my class. As he suggested, If we can use html tags to embed images from the web to place marks, can we use similar methods to embed other media types, and have them play inside the place mark too? This left me however with additional questions, what if this were not possible, how could we then provide a link to these resources, so they could be used, either as part of a presentation or as part of a data logging or "collect store and share," process. I am concerned that tools such as this do not get used simply because we can, but that the tools we choose to use should match the context of their use and support the generation and development of meaningful and purposeful outcomes. As I began to think my way round this I was also reminded of the E Safety issues we must consider when preparing and developing material for a project such as this. Because of the use of geolocation technologies, we need to ensure that we evaluate material with students to minimise personal reference and risks to identification. These are however considerations that we should all bear in mind as good practice when developing digital content with and for students, as central to their E Safety Education. In preparing digital media work, and reviewing material for publication, we need to bear in mind our school's e safety and digital permissions guidelines.
So this was my starting point. How could and why should I use video with quikmaps? What tools might I use to develop the video in the first place? What purpose might developing this resource or asset have? The notion of asset or resource development is I think a key one in how we view this tool and its role in the teaching and learning process. So where to go!
Contextualising this Asset
Our School is undergoing enormous changes at the moment with the development and construction of a new through campus, of which we will become part. In less than a year the school we now attend will be gone, and the landscape which the students are so familiar changed completely. A great context then for using video assets with students linked to Quikmaps might be to create a living History Archive.
Tools for the job!
I have used MS PhotoStory and Movie Maker a number of times with students at school to present and edit digital work, and with my class early in the year as part of a vodcast experiment. I have been really impressed with how quickly they are able compile and create projects from scratch with this tool, adding sound as a musical background or through direct recording of voiceovers for individual images. In contextualising this idea I am revisiting an idea from an earlier post regarding little patches of ground. As I said above the footprint our school currently leaves in its landscape is about to become a memory or shadow with the development of the new school campus, and its demolition, but this is a place has been a large part of our student's and community's lives for the past 50 years, so how do we preserve the legacy, while moving on?
Using PhotoStory to create a video
Using digital cameras the students might be asked to identify a place or memory from within the school grounds or locality that is special to them, that they would like to preserve or to change, and to capture 2 or 3 images which sum up the essence of their connection to that place, or sum up their reasons for choosing it. Returning to class they would import their images to Photostory, and begin drafting and or rehearsing their script, recording voiceovers to support their "voicethread." On completion the photostory would be exported to video, for upload to a web host.
Uploading Video to the Web
At the moment Quikmaps does not support independently hosted video, and my LA like most does not allow "YouTube" files through the firewall, for the time being anyway, they do seem to allow "Google Video" so for the sake of this project, I will upload my student video clips to "google video" marking them as unlisted educational files.
Once the videos are uploaded to Google, clicking on the file hyperlink takes me to a page where I can view the video file in its new google video format.
To the right of this screen is a link button to "email-embed html,"
Pressing this button offers the chance to get the "embed code" for the video file.
Click the "embed html" hyperlink to retrieve the code
Highlight and copy it.
Adding The Video Clip to a Quikmap Place Marker
I need to create my map as outlined in Imaging our Learning Journey and add our place markers. Once this has been done:
I Click on the pin I wish to associate my video clip with
Add a heading text or annotation for the clip.
Copy my "embed code" from Google Video
Return to my quikmaps window or tab
Right click in the place mark bubble and paste the embed code
Repeat this for each pin, and then save the map.
Viewing my Map with Video
Returning to the My Maps page, I can press the view larger image hyperlink, perhaps expanding the view to full screen.
Clicking on the placemarker pins, now not only opens a bubble, but one which contains a "Google Video" player, where I can watch the clip, attached to the context where it was shot, or with which it has an affiliation. (See the image at the beginning of this post)
This "Mashup" can now also be embedded itself into a blog, a website, or maybe even a wiki, by copying and pasting the code given in the "this map in my website" link.
Adding Hyperlinks
In addition to video from Google, embedding images from the web as described here, hyperlinks can also be added to place markers using html. So even if the resource or asset cannot be embedded in the place marker directly, then readers can be redirected to it. Inserting the following piece of code to a place marker where
Red = the tags embed the hyperlink
Blue text should be substituted with the web address/url/location of the resource on the web
Black text should be substituted to create the text in the placemark that describes the place being linked to.
Appologies for the blurriness and pixcelation in this image, will try to fix it later... The tag in place should look something like this.
Linking in this way makes reference to a place on the web, where content you cannot associate directly with the place marker can be found, eg a podcast, a website, or a wiki age/project. If associated with a media file, this would also enable direct download perhaps to the browser, to be saved to the user's computer, or with permission from the user, enable it to be opened in an appropriate application, eg a sound or video file in Media Player. If you wanted to use a file saved to an independent host site then this would be a possible solution to achieving this without using Google.
Born to Ponder
I wonder how many similar contexts for this asset could be conjured up. Some that stand out at the moment are
Recording, logging and tagging a field trip,
Logging experiences on a school journey. A Geoblog!?*
Thinking of Joe Dale and the use of digital media to support MFL, I was wondering whether there might be opportunities to use this tool to support development of MFL assets. Maybe drawing on the student's locality and experiences, to log familiar locations with images and adding/developing commentary in languages as well as English, to develop virtual tour guides, and tools for younger students.
On Wednesday afternoon we went for a walk around the school environment with the aim of exploring and capturing digitally features of the existing and currently changing landscape around the site. In previous posts, I have mentioned other projects involving creative partnerships, where students are logging these changes over time by digital means, as the new all through school rises in the space behind our current school building. During discussion with my class the other day, it slowly became apparent just how few of the students had actually noticed some of the more prominent features of the locality they pass everyday. It struck me as interesting how easy it is to assume and take for granted the knowledge and experiences our young cares bring to school of their locality and their place in it.
A couple of questions I have always found interesting to ask students when looking at a landscape painting are "where they think the artist was when they made the image?" and "what do they think might have been behind them, to the left, the right or above the canvas?" I pondered the other day how much I enjoyed sitting on the top deck of a bus, with the chance to see familiar settings from a different perspective, and from this came the idea for a digital landscape walk, using digital photographs to enable students to capture different views from the same location, that we could then use to focus discussion back in the classroom in relation to a map of the journey.
This map created using quikmaps, shows an aerial photograph of the route we followed with the students. Each of the small map pins, showing a staging point on the journey. The students used digital blue cameras at each staging point to capture two images, one looking out from the school into the surrounding landscape, and another after a 180 degree turn that captured the scene looking back towards the school grounds. Back in class the students were encouraged to review their images, identifying and locating on a shared map where each image had been captured, before matching the two opposing landscape perspectives, to locations on the map. To follow up, and as a table top activity, small groups of students were given copies of a blank map and challenged to mark the route they had followed, locate the staging points for themselves before finally mapping their images to their locations.
The students are currently using 2 Simple's 2create, to to develop their own interactive atlases. These are very much in the developmental stage. We have used maps downloaded from World Atlas.com, to create slides that begin with the world and which will progressively zoom down onto the place where we live and work, using hyperlinked buttons to enable this. I am now thinking how interesting it would be to extend the project, by encouraging the students to think about how this tool could be used to to create a textured presentation about our school in its landscape, maybe in a virtual tour type format. Using 2Create, means that the final projects can be exported in flash format for publication to the web, or on the year group blog, providing audience and purpose for the outcomes.
Post Script:
YAY! Thanks to Tom Barrett and Twitter I have now also learned how to add some of the images that the students captured to our quikmap. This is really exciting...
I eventually got round to buying a copy of Comic Life for PC, from the good folk at TAG Learning on my recent visit to BETT, and having installed it on my laptop, am all geared up to use it as part of my Assessment For Learning toolbox.
In school we keep classroom scrapbooks, where we have begun to use digital photographs alongside written or scribed records of "snippets" from student talk to help tell learning stories. "Narratives of Learning" have been a key feature in my research work, forming the basis for data analysis, as well as acting as a vehicle to share my work with others. Classrooms are multimodal places, and context is key to using "data forms" we collect there. I have come to see learning and teaching events as acts of shared meaning making, where language is the primary mediating tool. Working with young children the ways in we share meanings and negotiate common understanding is usually through tool mediated talk and activity. Despite our knowledge that talk and effective questioning is often more revealing about the processes that students engage in when learning, than the material they record, we still seem to have a strong drive to ensure that what the students do is logged, even if as a dated sentence. What is missing from this as from previous methods of recording progress, tick lists and charts, is frequently the process that lead to the outcome, and the success of the child however small. The joy, the excitement, the disappointment, the shock so readily visible in the faces and gestures of the student, or the gusto and energy that students apply to the tasks they "do," followed perhaps by the surprise or pride in something believed to be so difficult suddenly achievable. Somehow all of this magic, the moments that bring joy not only to the class but that in my opinion, make classroom teaching so worthwhile and exciting, are rarely so transparent or the richness of the experience we shared evident when we look through our exercise books.
I have been incredibly excited by our Class Podcasts and Blog that have begun to inject a student voice literally into the recording system. Context driven activities with a sense of purpose and audience, that have begun to help both my students and myself engage with self review and evaluation, and are beginning through collaborative action to support a growing digital record of the "long Conversation" we have as teachers and learners. I am increasingly aware however that these objects, do not fit into the world of outcome driven assessment. What of the process behind these, the journey and the long conversation hidden behind and that lead to them. Well perhaps tools such as Comic Life can begin to offer me some scaffolding for this.
In PE this term we have been developing "passing and receiving" skills through the playing and designing of simple invasion games, and this week the students have been working in small groups to create their own, with the development in our next session of jigsawing to share our games with each other. The genuine learning experiences that have lead to this would be lost witho0ut the means to log or record them. Armed with digital camera, I had initially thought about creating a PowerPoint Learning story, and then as previously, using PowerPoint for Mac to change these into a video format to share with others. Instead I have opted to use Comic Life, with the students to create comic strips that tell the story behind their game and how it is played. My Numeracy Group require a great deal of practical work and consolidation, and their activities too are often transient mediated by recordings on Dry wipe whiteboards, through talk and the apparatus they use. These experiences are no less important to them as learners, than the need to show progress through written recording. As can be seen in previous posts, these processes too I have been frequently logged using digital Photographs and PowerPoint. I have pondered today, on how the practice of foundation stage colleagues might help me to log these events and processes. Using "post it" notes to record children's talk as we work, that can later be used to annotate digital photographs in Comic Life through the addition of speech and thought bubbles.
Comic Life affords a number of means of publication for the strips developed. They can either be printed out on completion, for inclusion in our scrapbook, or exported to html, for inclusion in our website community pages, adding another means of sharing our activity with carers. On interesting format, that I haven't had a go with yet, is the ability to export as movie. This will be something to play with later.
I recieved my lessons2go mail from ICTopus today, and was inspired by the possibilities that might be afforded through images presented in the online archive today's activities were based around...
"Object Lessons is an online display of about 200 objects from Islington Artefacts Library. The site has high quality images and information on each object."
I was just pondering how some of the ideas I presented in an earlier post entitled, "images from the past," might work alongside the activities presented within the site. Or even how these images might be used as standalone, starting with an image tasks, using the IWB to support inferential work and thinking together.
Just found this great link, Via Twitter, and a visit to Thinking Past The Square, a blog by a Y3-4 teacher in Auckland. Spell With Flickr, enter a word, after a short wait, if available it returns image tiles from Flickr that match your search. It also returns code enabling the images to be embedded. This is what was returned when I typed in my name.
It reminded me of the fun my Y3 class had a while back with hieroglyphic writing tools on sites such as this at the University of Pensylvania's, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where I made this Cartouche showing my name.
And also a Y4 class who loved using Viking Rune tools like the one I found here on the PBS Network, (unfortunately I couldn't embed my new found Viking name "Longshanks.") Students do find it fascinating and fun to play with ancient alphabets. To add another dimension to spelling and handwriting sessions, I downloaded a Futhark alphabet font set from Simply the Best a while back, and used these to make decoding games that really challenged some of the students thinking about how our alphabet works as a set of "sound pictures."
My students are currently thinking about designing a Picture Frame fit for a king in DT, and have been beavering away to create portraits, other than by digital means, to put in these magnificent structures.
They were desperate to share what they had been doing with their parents at home, so we photographed our favourites this afternoon, and using the Microsoft Power Toys, HTML Slide Show Wizard and Image Resizer mentioned in a previous post, I managed quite quickly to publish their work for them to the school webspace this evening.
To have a look at what these really powerful little tools can do follow this link. You may experience difficulties in viewing the slideshow if you are not using Internet Explorer, as I discovered this evening while trying to preview the pages in Firefox.
I have been putting together a display of photographs, collected during our plenary session in maths today. We introduced right angles during the session, and having made their right angle measurers, the students were set the challenge of finding as many examples as possible, and recording them as labeled drawings. At the end of the session the students excitedly fed back on the objects they had found, and armed with my digital camera I set about photographing these as they told me what they had discovered. On reflection it might have also been interesting to let them have access to the Digi Blues, so they could capture their right angles as they found them.
Bringing the images home I wondered how I might highlight the features they had found for display. The images used in the photostory below, have been very simply edited in order to achieve this. I used Photofiltre, the open source graphics editor I have mentioned in previous posts to do this.
In some images, where the orientation was OK, the right angles have been marked with squares, the standard method used to denote them. While in others I have used a circle, with the fill transparency increased to give a spotlight type effect, around or over the angles.
To do this in photofiltre, you use the select tool, drag your shape over the area you want to place it and then from the edit menu, select "stroke and fill." From the dialogue box that appears you can then select the stroke or fill colours you want to use, alter the thickness of the stroke, and change the opacity of the fill too.
Later in the week we will be looking more closely at the properties of quadrilaterals, and thinking about shapes we can see in everyday objects. Perhaps here I could let the students loose with the digi blues and send them off on themed shape hunts. It might be interesting to see what they return with, if asked to photograph examples of particular groups of 2 and 3 d shapes?
This week we have been mostly writing instructions in Year 3. But what use are instructions without an audience and a purpose? And how have we used ICT to help? Rather than starting with the perfect instructional text, we began with our student's prior experiences of the genre.
Bringing into school a few potted plants, old plant pots and a bag of compost, I began the session by telling a tale, the story of how I had tried to re-pot the plants I had with me. Being concerned to get it right, I had emailed my friend for advice, but the instructions they had sent me, had left me confused, and my kitchen in a real mess. It was now the cleanest it had been in a long time, but this was only after I had managed to get water and compost everywhere. What I had managed to figure out from my friend's letter was that the things I had with me would would help me to finish the job I had started. Our mission as a class this week was to reshape the email, and create a good set of instructions that we could publish to help other people learn how to pot their houseplants. The publishing format I left blank...
Preparing for the first session my colleague was great, helping out by flanneling and sending the woolliest letter she could imagine, actions completely jumbled and out of sequence, and rather than telling me what to do... she had made suggestions about how I might like to do it. I made two copies of the email. Placing each on separate pages in a Smartbook. One copy was the entire letter as a block of text to share and discuss. The second a version of the letter was split into dragable sentences. Beginning with the block text, we checked through it together using this to unpick problems through discussion, and highlighting issues as we went, while we began thinking about how my friend's email should have been written. Using the dragable text and suggestions from the students we tried rearranging pieces of the letter to see if it could be changed to make more sense. This acted as our first class draft. Using this set of class instructions the students repotted some plants in small groups. As the students worked a digital camera was used to photograph the steps they followed. To end the session we reviewed the draft instructions, and began to edit them on screen, taking out the "suggestions," made by my colleague's email and replacing them with "command words," that drew on the practical experience to describe what had been done. We also added additional steps that we thought were missing, eg putting down newspaper to keep the surfaces clean.
For our second session, the digital photographs taken during the first were imported to the smartbook, and used in a storyboarding activity. Using this new "dragable" tool we revisited and thought about the sequence and order of activities we carried out in the previous session. As visual prompts our photos were used to scaffold a "talking for writing" session. The photographs had been inserted in a random order, so we needed to rearrange them in a chronological sequence. Then the storyboard that resulted was used to rehearse aloud the text we might use to produce clear " instructional sentences" to support them. The onscreen story board as well as being a visual class prompt, modelled the table top, storyboard activity the students would use during the lesson to plan the sequence of Instructions they would use later to write and publish.
In our third session we looked at a set of prepared instructions, and pulled out the key features of the text type. What would a good set of instructions include? We would need a clear title, and would need to split our text into sections, "what you need" and a "what to do." The to do list was identified as a list and we discussed how this could be laid out across the page using commas, or down the page using bullets. We closed the session by looking at how the sentences began, and had a quick look at our storyboards. Did each of our instructional sentences begin with a command word? The model we had explored and developed on screen, became a writing frame, and the students worked individually during the remainder of the session to draft their own set of instructions drawing on their storyboards, to help, but being encouraged to refine their text as they worked. The outcomes are great, and next week will be including one or two in our blog.
Writing is for Reading...
Extending the written instructional text activity, I worked yesterday with a small group of students using Microsoft Photostory, to create a simple vodcast. Using the photographs taken earlier in the week, and instructions written by the students they added voiceovers to image clips, before exporting these to video in .wmv format.
I uploaded these later to Zamzar for conversion to Quick Time's .mov format. I have set up a class account and podcast page at Podomatic, and have published the video file to this space. As I mentioned in an earlier post about using PhotoStory for this purpose, it all may sound a bit complicated and convoluted , but with a little practice the publishing process is quite straight forward. This was my first attempt in class at doing this particular type of activity, and a process that was completely new to the students. I was really pleased with the video outcome it is a little rough and ready in places, but I think it models really well what can be achieved using tools such as this in a classroom context. You will notice the background hum from the classroom where it was recorded. Real children working together, as this group record their file. I like the count in, as one of the students leaves a run in space at the beginning of his voiceover track, not realising at this point that his count is also being recorded. The idea of students taking turns is also inherent in the file as they swapped places and the mike to each record different sections. As a first attempt, there is much to discuss. Asking the class what we might do to reduce the sound level, when we are recording in class. Perhaps reviewing the process of authoring a text like this by asking about strategies we might use to carry out the count in which was so important. Do we need to designate roles in the process, and have a director or software operator as well as narrator.
I have experienced many times from colleagues "the its alright for you but.." statement, But I think this is a really exciting way to work, not only for me but the students too. Learning to use PhotoStory does not take long, but it is a potentially powerful device. If you would like to watch our vodcast file you can find it by following this link. I look forward to any comments or thoughts you may have.
We are exploring Shape Poems in class, and I wanted to place a few example that we could share into a Smartbook.
In the past I have scanned images showing similar texts that I want to share, dragging the resulting images into a smartbook to be worked on or annotated. This can be incredibly time consuming but the results are usually spectacular, even though the file sizes can be large. But how to get Big Books onto the big screen thats a different matter. No one I suspect has an A1 scanner. However many of us do have digital cameras.
heres a quick how to
Place the Big Book on a table, or the floor.
Frame the page you want to use in your viewfinder
Snap away. ( you might want to find a space with lots of light and turn off the flash!)
I have a card reader, so taking the memory card out of my camera the PC treats this like a flash drive. Using this tool the image folder on the camera's memory card can be opened like any other on the computer then opening the Smart Notebook, the photograph of the page can be dragged from the card directly into the smartbook.
The whole process of including four pages from a big book took about 5 minutes this morning, and created an instant resource I could share with my students. Locking the images to page, we highlighted nouns and adjectives in situ, discussed and added new openers for the poem, brainstormed and collected alternative WOW words we might use to replace some text elements, before going off in small groups to innovate on the starting point.
Another useful application for this process is in creating stories to share for assembly, instead of using smartbook or powerpoint another old chestnut however you might want to try the slideshow tool in Windows Picture and Fax viewer.
Here take photographs, or scan the pages you want to use as before, but inorder to force the slideshow tool to play the pages in order, rename them. I often use the alphabet, eg page 1 is "a.jpg," 2 is "b.jpg," or use 3 digit numbers beginning with for example 001.jpg, 002.jpg and so on. Place all the images in one folder on your PC or Laptop, as this will also speed up loading on screen.
When you are ready to use the story, open the folder with your images in and right click on "a.jpg," or "001.jpg," and then select open with from the menu, followed by Windows picture and Fax viewer. When the software opens, press the slideshow icon. With slideshow open you can control the turning of pages with the play and pause button. This could also be used in literacy hour on the SmartBoard, by using pens to annotate texts, and then using the screen capture tools to transfer your annotated pages to a smartbook for later use.
Green Park Station, is a little off the beaten tourist track. No longer in use for its designed purpose this attractive building is now home to a local farmer's market, houses a number of small specialist retail outlets, and is part of the local Sainsbury's car park. However despite its aesthetic and retail therapy appeal it is as a mathematical resource, that I was drawn out of doors one damp Saturday afternoon, and before a leisurely shop and a coffee in the Brasserie, I wandered around armed with a digital camera to snap these images.
It has been interesting to engage recently with posts around the use of ICT and digital media within the Literacy Hour, so I thought I would turn my attentions towards thinking about the potential some of the tools explored might hold for the Mathematics Framework.
Using and applying has a central dimension within the new mathematics framework, and the recent NCETM research digest mentioned in a previous post, draws our gaze toward the valuable role that talk has to play, through class discussion, collaborative group work and guided investigational activity in developing and rehearsing processes while contextualising the use and application of mathematical vocabulary in context.
The real world context of Green Park, is alive with shapes. Its curving semi-circular central roof, supported on cylndrical pillars, presents the impression of a majestic semi cylindrical covering to what was once the train shed. While a closer look shows the glass roof itself not to be curved, but made up of rectangular panes of glass, rising to an apex, that makes it triangular in appearance. Wooden wall panels made up of tesselated rectangles, cross braced to divide the irregular quadrilaterals still further into right angle and equilateral or are they isoceles triangles. Supporting structures from the pillars create triangular openings with curved sides, arcs and to the sides of these are mounted spherical lamps. Windows form rectangular openings in the fascade of a largley cuboidal building, divided into smaller rectangles the window frames in turn hold still smaller square panes of glass. Vertical, upright girders form perpendicular supports riveted to horizontal beams which rise parallel to their neighbours. The central roof, and facias also present yet more tesselating and symetrical patterns to be explored.
Using the IWB and/or printouts of the images there is enormous potential to frame discussions around the properties of shapes. From simple shape hunts to the investigation of congruence, and shapes within shapes, from identifying lines of symmetry to describing and reasoning about the forms evident in the photographs. Extending and developing this with students themselves we might create local shape trails, using digital cameras to help develop not only their observational skills but encouraging them to focus on the structures around them and their features in the landscape.
There is an increasing catologue of ready made Excel, and flash or object based tools, available on the New Mathematics Framework Website, sorted and grouped by strand and unit, for use with the whiteboard or by students in the ICT suite. In the Literacy Framework there is an increasing focus on how digital technologies might be used to support learning outcomes practically as extentions and alternative ways of presenting activities developed within the and from the Literacy Hour. Perhaps activities such as this might be one way of beginning to see that ICT can be used in a similar way for the presentation, exploration and representation of mathematical ideas.
