Techxperts – saving the world, one screencast at a time

This term, Louise and I have started an after school activity for Grade 4 and 5 students called Techxperts. Here’s how we marketed it to the students:

Do you love using computers and other bits of technology? Are you a bit of a Tech Wizard? Do you know how to use programmes such as Photo Story, Adobe Premiere Elements, Scratch or Google Earth? Do you like to help others?

If so, then the UWC Techxperts need YOU!

Survey students and teachers to see where they need support (and learn to create and use Google Forms in the process).

Create screencasts which show people how to use the programmes we have at school.

Create help sheets to solve common troubleshooting problems.

UWC Techxperts: Saving the world, one screencast at a time.

Student-created products (to-date) include:

• A series of  screencasts on how to use Diigo
• A how-to poster for the lab on what to do if you come across a ‘locked’ computer
• A screencast on how to use PhotoStory (from go to woah!)
• A how-to poster for the lab on how to log-in to Jing
• A poster showing the 4 different things to check if your headphones aren’t working

We have been using Jing as our screencast tool of choice. The kids find it really easy to use and were absolutely stoked to try making screencasts and annotated screen captures.

The posters are up in the computer lab, and it has been fabulous to have student-generated products to direct students to with those common troubleshooting problems.

When introducing PhotoStory to Grade 2 students (who had never used it before), it was fantastic to have a screencast which outlined exactly how to get started, from a student’s point of view. I have created screencasts myself previously, but I think it’s nice for them to be made by kids, for kids.

Here are the screencasts which show how to Bookmark & Highlight a page using Diigo, by Jean-Luc.

Do you love using computers and other bits of technology? Are you a bit of a Tech Wizard? Do you know how to use programmes such as Photo Story, Adobe Premiere Elements, Scratch or Google Earth? Do you like to help others?

If so, then the UWC Techxperts need YOU!

Survey students and teachers to see where they need support (and learn to create and use Google Forms in the process).

Create screencasts which show people how to use the programmes we have at school.

Create help sheets to solve common troubleshooting problems.

UWC Techxperts: Saving the world, one screencast at a time.

Cross-posted at U Tech Tips

Techxperts – saving the world, one screencast at a time

This term, Louise and I have started an after school activity for Grade 4 and 5 students called Techxperts. Here’s how we marketed it to the students:

Do you love using computers and other bits of technology? Are you a bit of a Tech Wizard? Do you know how to use programmes such as Photo Story, Adobe Premiere Elements, Scratch or Google Earth? Do you like to help others?

If so, then the UWC Techxperts need YOU!

Survey students and teachers to see where they need support (and learn to create and use Google Forms in the process).

Create screencasts which show people how to use the programmes we have at school.

Create help sheets to solve common troubleshooting problems.

UWC Techxperts: Saving the world, one screencast at a time.

Student-created products (to-date) include:

• A series of  screencasts on how to use Diigo
• A how-to poster for the lab on what to do if you come across a ‘locked’ computer
• A screencast on how to use PhotoStory (from go to woah!)
• A how-to poster for the lab on how to log-in to Jing
• A poster showing the 4 different things to check if your headphones aren’t working

We have been using Jing as our screencast tool of choice. The kids find it really easy to use and were absolutely stoked to try making screencasts and annotated screen captures.

The posters are up in the computer lab, and it has been fabulous to have student-generated products to direct students to with those common troubleshooting problems.

When introducing PhotoStory to Grade 2 students (who had never used it before), it was fantastic to have a screencast which outlined exactly how to get started, from a student’s point of view. I have created screencasts myself previously, but I think it’s nice for them to be made by kids, for kids.

Here are the screencasts which show how to Bookmark & Highlight a page using Diigo, by Jean-Luc.

Do you love using computers and other bits of technology? Are you a bit of a Tech Wizard? Do you know how to use programmes such as Photo Story, Adobe Premiere Elements, Scratch or Google Earth? Do you like to help others?

If so, then the UWC Techxperts need YOU!

Survey students and teachers to see where they need support (and learn to create and use Google Forms in the process).

Create screencasts which show people how to use the programmes we have at school.

Create help sheets to solve common troubleshooting problems.

UWC Techxperts: Saving the world, one screencast at a time.

Cross-posted at U Tech Tips

Spicing up Parts of Speech

In Grade 1, students have been completing a unit on poetry, and learning about parts of speech. Let’s face it: parts of speech are not the most engaging and exciting topic of study for kids, so finding a way to make it enjoyable was high on our list of priorities.

We found the perfect vehicle for spicing it up – Wordle!

The Grade 1 teachers talked about -ing words in class (verbs), so students came to the lab with a sound understanding of the topic. We decided to make -ing poems so the students could demonstrate their understanding of -ing verbs, and present their understanding in a visually appealing way.

We initially used Microsoft Word to type the poems up, because it meant we had a back-up plan in case we needed to change the spelling or formatting of our Wordles. I asked the students to type the title -ing poem three times (to make it larger on the final wordle), and their name three times as well (so we could easily identify the finished Wordles). Following that, the students typed in as many different -ing words as they could.

We thought a minimum of 15 words would make a reasonably good-looking Wordle, but challenged the students to come up with as many as possible. This provided teachers a lot of useful information, including:

• Who understood the task;
• Identifying any misconceptions students held
• The level of vocabulary students were typing;
• Students’ spelling abilities;
• Which students have sound keyboard knowledge, and which students don’t;

We then moved on to introduce/reinforce some important technological operations and concepts in the process of making our Wordles, including:

• Ctrl + A = highlight all
• Ctrl + C = copy
• Ctrl + V = paste
• Capitalisation methods – Shift + letter, or Caps Lock on and Caps Lock Off
• Awareness of the spell check function in Microsoft Word

We used Jing to capture the finished Wordles, and they are now being displayed in the class.

Kindergarten: Have passport, will travel

I have been back in the Kindergarten with Ms Louise (and the other wonderful teachers on our K2 team), using Google Earth with the K2 students.

What is great about using Google Earth is that it gives the students practice with logging onto the computers, keyboard familiarisation and mouse-control skills in a thoroughly engaging context.

I  did an initial lesson with Ms Louise’s class, showing how to navigate and input places into the search bar, and we also checked out some places using Street View. The students really enjoyed experimenting with zooming, going to locations they had been on holiday, and finding our school.

Ms Louise’s brilliant idea (which tied in with their unit on Journeys) was to create task cards for a number of famous places around the world, which the students would have to ‘travel’ to in order to get a stamp in their passport.

Using Jing, she created the task cards (see below), which were an enormous success, as they helped scaffold the learning for the students. The text they had to type was on each task card, and a picture of the place they had to find was also included. When their screen showed what we could see on the task card, then they got a stamp in their passport.

Some were harder than others, requiring a bit of searching, zooming and clicking-and-dragging to find the locations. This just helped us reinforce the skills we were hoping to cover in this unit.

It also gave us an opportunity to talk about commas and spaces, as both were needed when typing in locations. The students quickly learned that after each comma, you need a space.

I know the K2 teachers were impressed with how much the students could accomplish in a few short lessons. The levels of enthusiasm have been great, and some poor teachers have been hounded by students wanting to complete their passport.

We have had neat feedback from a number of K2 parents saying how their children are making them use Google Earth at home, so it’s lovely to hear of the home-school connections that this type of lesson is creating. It reinforces to me how fabulous it is to use an open-source, cross-platform tool such as Google Earth to make links between home and school.

With Ms Louise’s permission, I have included the Google Earth Task Cards & Passport below. I hope you take the time to try it out!

Google Earth Task Cards

Google Earth Passport

**If you are using the same computers with different children, then I would encourage you to get them to click on Edit then Clear Search History at the beginning of each session, so that the place names don’t start appearing automatically!**

A few of my favourite things – 14 October 2008

I’m getting into the swing of the classroom thing after a year’s hiatus, and would like to share a few of my favourite things with you.

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Jing is a screen capture software which allows you to capture video or image files. You can save, embed or share the files you create. Very handy for use with kids when your only other options are either print or sign up. As always, academic honesty is encouraged, and students are expected to acknowledge the source of their screen captures. My grade 2-4 students are managing to use it very successfully for things like making screencasts of the places they have lived via Google Earth, capturing avatars, or saving their wordles.

Which brings me to… WORDLE!

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds

I know it really is a tool that makes things look funkier than I would be capable of myself, but I think it has potential for deeper use than solely decoration. We used it in the obvious way in the classroom – each student made a wordle of their interests, beliefs and values, which linked to a unit on ‘Who we Are‘. I have also considered its use as a statistical tool – if you had a list of options for a survey question, it would be a neat way of presenting the responses. I believe people have used it to analyse polital speeches for word frequency, famous sayings and the like as well.

Delicious

My delicious account is one of my most treasured sites. Being able to go through all my bookmarks, explore my network’s bookmarks and search for various tags has been invaluable. This is one of the first places I suggest teachers new to web 2.0 start, as everyone has favourite bookmarks and being able to piggy-back off other people’s helps create a fantastic collection of resources.

kwout | A brilliant way to quote

I feel that Kwout really does live up to it’s tagline – it IS a brilliant way to quote! Especially for people using blogs, as the ability to take a screen capture, embed it AND provide a link saves a great deal of time. The students are especially receptive to the visual aspect of it, and it certainly pretties up a blog which would ordinarily be filled with stock-standard links.

Edublogs – education blogs

I can’t think what I would have done if it weren’t for edublogs. Ok, I probably would be happy enough using blogger, but the fact that edublogs is specifically designed for education makes it so much more easy to use. I have set up kids’ blogs, and we are about to embark on that particular avenue soon. The kids are over the moon, and so am I, what with administrative rights and comment moderation!

Google Reader

Google reader is my daily professional development. Best of all, it’s free! I love learning from the wonderful and inspiring edubloggers out there such as Jeff Utecht, Kim Cofino, Vicki Davis, Dean Shareski, Suzie Vesper, Ewan McIntosh, David Warlick, to name a few. I have learned so much from these people, none of whom I have ever met. They challenge my beliefs and ideas, and push me towards new learning. I love it!

Anyway, my list of favourites is hardly exhaustive, but damnit, it’s a pretty good start.