- I give the ipad the finger…until the second generation comes out with multi-application tasking, webcam and new name. #
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Powered by Twitter Tools. Well we’re another week closer to the Holiday vacation and Tiger wasn’t drunk, he was just avoiding his golf club yielding wife. I thought this befitting of a joke. Q: What’s the difference between a car and a golf ball? A: Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball 400 yards… I never said it was good joke. Tech Showcase: Kevin Desmond and David Young have been doing a great deal with voice recording/podcasting and making digital stories with narrations. They have used everything from Voice Recorder (PC) to GarageBand to Audacity to record the voices and stories of their ESOL students. These are then posted to the portal and Kevin posts them to the ESOL blog site. Another tool they use is VoiceThread. Voicethread is a web based photostory application that allows you to upload photos and audio to make digital stories. The cool thing that seperates VoiceThread from other applications like iMovie and Photostory is that anyone can view your photostory (if you want them to) and make audio comments on the pictures in your slideshow. This way, not only can you share your photostory, you can also start conversations around them. This can be a very powerful tool for students reflecting on writing. Below are two links, one is an example of a VoiceThread Kevin made around Just Right Books and the second link will take you to VoiceThread. I urge you to visit VoiceThread and have a play for yourself, make a talking Christmas card “book” for your family. The second showcase piece this week is from Kathryn Dungan. She has been using GarageBand to record audio versions of books in the second grade classrooms for her ESOL students (and any other student in the classes) to listen to. This is a great way to differentiate instruction for your auditory learners. According to Kathryn, “It allows me to be in two places at once. I can have kids at a station listening to these books and I can be at another doing small group work as the kids work through their stations.” She saves the audio books on the I: drive so they are accessible from any computer in the 2nd grade. Below you will find a link to one of these audio books, Bearenstein Bears Go to Camp. Have a listen at your leisure or download it and put it into iTunes to listen to on your iPod/iPhone. These audio books are also an excellent way to use the iPods we now have available through Ellen in the A/V closet. You could load a bunch of these stories on iPods and have them available for your kids in class to listen to whenever appropriate. Weekly Tech Tip Granted, you can only listen once. But if you like the song you can buy a web version of it for a mere 10 cents. It’s then saved in your personal library, accessible from any browser, MP3 versions are available for an additional 79 cents (that’s cheaper than iTunes). These are loaded straight into iTunes and, because they are DRM-free, can be played on any device you have. This means all the music is licensed (and legal). In other words, your days as a music pirate may be over. Better than iTunes, because they are not coded like they are when you buy music from iTunes, you can share the music from Lala with as many people you want and listen to it on any device. So go ahead, get that Bing Crosby album you used to listen to during the holidays or that long lost Vanilla Ice album you have been to ashamed to ask your friends for. Here are my weeks Tech Showcase projects. First, A big shout out to The 5th grade team who are off and running with class blogging. I especially invite you to look at the 5TM and 5SH class blogs, but more so, I invite you to run down their blogroll’s and take a look at some great student blogging. Why is it so great? Why should I bother? Both valid questions. First, as a teacher it is great to see what students are writing and saying and thinking. It keeps us in touch with our “clientele”. Second, their students’ post are succinct, about school and their lives and lack fluff, cartoons, pictures, etc. that don’t relate to their writing. Third, it is just plain impressive to see the writing our kids are capable of and that is a testament to the hard work you teachers put into reading/writing here at SAS. ***A friendly reminder, if you are blogging with kids, make sure all their blogs are linked to your teacher blogs, we want their blogs as accessible as possible so parents, other students, and the world can see the great things you and your kids are doing in class. Second, the first graders have been using Kidspiration lately to do a “virtual” grocery shopping trip. They were asked to select 5 healthy and 5 unhealthy foods from the stamps in kidspiration and place them into a shopping cart template. Besides the obvious of kids having to make smart choices about the food they were selecting, they also got to practice their mouse skills-dragging and dropping, opening a file from their network folder (big stuff for these little guys), and it got them talking about food choices. Is pizza healthy or unhealthy? The debate still rages. To see what the Kidspiration template looked like and to read more about this project you can read my blog post at: Finally, as promised, my personal tech tip for all of you. Actually there are two this week. 1) With Thanksgiving around the corner I thought this site would be timely for all of you who will be spending some time in the kitchen in the upcoming week. http://www.cookstr.com offers a celebrated list of recipes provided by a roster of 250 star chefs and cookbook authors (including Alice Waters, Mario Batali, Daniel Boulud, Julia Child and Jamie Oliver, among others). The dishes in here look amazing and there are a ton of Thanksgiving dishes just waiting for you to try your hand at. C’mon, step out of www.recipes.com and try something new. Your mouth will thank you. 2) Now that we are all MAC users and I see a lot of you with music in your iTunes I thought you might find this little tip handy for organizing your music, finding missing track titles, and getting that long lost cover to that ‘77 Cornell Grateful Dead Show that you have been searching for. Look no further than http://www.tuneupmedia.com. TuneUp, is an application that fills in the missing info–artist,song name, album, release year, cover art and genre–for any music in your digital library. TuneUp runs alongside iTunes. You drag your “dirty” tracks into the TuneUp box and it compares the songs to the Gracenote database, pulling in the missing data. While TuneUp isn’t 100%reliable at identifying every song ever made it was accurate enough to straighten out my messy song library. I have started to do a weekly tech roundup here at SAS. I usually include 1-2 integration projects as well as something that teachers can use in their personal lives for their own productivity. Here was my first attempt. I have started to send out a weekly Friday tech roundup to staff. Here is the first installment Hey all, **First, hats off to 3BR for completing two different digital photostories in two days. The first link is to an example of a personal narrative that students in her class made using Kidpix to illustrate three pics (beginning, middle, and end) of their personal narrative and MS Photostory to put narration over the pictures and turn it into a movie. **Second, 3rd grade has been studying bones and muscles so 3BR made group photostories using images of different joints pulled from the Internet. They put these into MS Photostory, narrated them using a script that group members came up with, and saved them as movies. THE BEST PART, THIS PROJECT WAS COMPLETELY DONE BY STUDENTS. After the narrative photostory the kids had the basics of manipulating the software down and were able to fly through this second assignment. Another advantage, they had to script out the narration, a great way to incorporate tech into your writer’s/reader’s workshop activities/lessons. **Last, but not least, a little tech that you might use for your personal life. The holiday season is upon us and it can be tough buying gifts for family back home. Fear not. Grandma and Grandpa will love receiving a photo book of your kids and your adventures on this side of the world. Blurb can help. Keep reading for their link and a description of their services Blurb is a self-publishing service that allows you to make glossy, professional-grade photo books. This way, you can solve the problem of the hundreds of digital photos sitting in some forgotten folder on your computer and share them with those who are close to you. Start by downloading their software (it took no time at all) and you are on your way creating your photo books for Grams and Gramps. Hi-res photos take a little time to load, but their system is intuitive and the editing process is fun. A week after you finish they’ll ship you an art store-quality book with your photos (and words) spread across the pages. As always, have fun and keep the tires on the road.  by davidsilver (The above picture has nothing to do with digital literacy) There are times where I have to force myself out of my office. Between the constant deluge of emails, administering different portal apps that we use here at school and putting out the usual day-to day fires that constantly happen as machine fail or teachers run into problems that they cannot fix on their own with machines, network connections and the like, it makes it hard to get out of the chair and into the halls and classes at times. However, I am never disappointed when I to go for my “walks”. Today, as an example I managed to have two great conversations with two of my fifth grade teachers- Steve Hanlin and Louise Hughson about 21st century literacy and the skills the kids in 5ht grade and in all of the ES need to have as they move forward in their learning. Certainly we are making good things happen but we fall well short with teaching kids to be digitally literate. We are still teaching our “digital natives” in a analog kind of way that was well suited to the analog 20th century but not so much to the 21st century digital landscape that they are going to face more and more. Largely, I feel, this is due to the fact that our writer’s and reader’s workshop fails to recognize this and in doing so is an outdated model of reading. To ignore digital literacies is to ill-equip our students with the skills they need moving forward her eat SAS especially since once they leave the SAS they are expected to do almost all of the reading and writing on a computer in the 1:1 environment. So in discussing this came two teachers that are not satisfied that they are doing the best for their kids and want to do more. Music to my ears. So on the schedule is now a series of lessons I will be doing wiht these classes regarding researching and assessing information online, and another on using the laptop as a learning tool for the kids-mostly here howthe can organize notes and information so that they can make it more user firendly to support their own learning. This latter lesson is also a great and easy way for a student to differentiate his/her own learning to best suit their needs. Once I have these lessons under way I will post more about them with examples of what the students are learning and producing.
Ok, I have to admit it, its the tech part of me that is responsible for this but I think my guitar teacher is getting phased out….for my laptop. It isn’t that he is not a good teacher or anything, it is just that I have to pay him and I can get lessons more suited to my goals with the guitar by using my iPhone, my MacBook and Garageband. Here is a breakdown of these three items and how I use them.
I will probably continue wiht my face to face lessons for a little whill only because they force me to practice when I know that I will be paying for a lessoon and I do not want to kook the things I should have learned and mastered the week before. In the end, as I become mor ecomfortable and can start piecing things together on my own I think I will phase these lessons out though and go it alone and just get together with some friends and play. In the end this all reminds me of Thomas Friedaman’s book, The Earth is Flat, where he says that any job that can be done by a machine or by someone else for cheaper will be and if you have a job where there is someone or something else that can do it for you, you will be replaced. Sorry Andrew.   The 1st graders have been busy studying food as of late. As part of their unit they are making informed decisions about foods that healthy vs. foods that might taste good but not be so good for you. Part of these lessons took place in the lab using Kidspiration 2 to make a graphic organizer for the kids. Using a custom template with two shopping carts, kids went “grocery shopping” using the stamps provided in Kidspiration. They were asked to put 10 items into each one of their carts-Healthy and Unhealthy. It is a very simple lesson indeed but I do think it is effective in getting kids to make choices and it is interesting to see where they draw the line between healthy and unhealthy foods. For example, pizza was a tough one. Think about it. For a young child it has all the healthy parts-Bread, cheese, and pepperoni and or veggies. We teach kids that these are all parts of a healthy diet yet somehow when we put all these ingredients together the pizza can become something not so healthy. And, this in the end, is where the true value of this lesson comes in. the discussions that are generated and the views of the kids on what they view healthy food as is more important than the tech. or the software but it is the tech and software in this case that helps lead us to those conversations. 
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