With Windows Live Writer you can write your posts offline and then publish them when you are finished. This will be a great help to me as I usually write my posts in Word – and the HTML code is very complicated behind the scenes. Correcting the formatting in the published post is also a headache! I am using Live Writer now for the first time so I’ll be able to comment on how easy it is to use in a minute. To install Live Writer this is what you need to do:
2. Click on Download now. It will give you an option to download the whole Live Essentials pack. Untick the blocks that you don’t require.
3. Install Live Write.
4. Choose your blog type and follow the instruction.
5. Once everything is ready and you have restarted your computer you can start writing your post offline, and then publish it.
Just to recap, here is a short video from the Partners in Learning UK site giving the instructions for using Live Writer.
Well, I have taken a look at the published post and wow! I love the formatting! If I look behind the scenes to the HTML code it is very neat and straightforward. I might be doing all my posts like this in future!
In one of our pre-assignments before attending PIL Institute in Redmond, we were asked to discuss our views on 21st century teaching and learning, and also add artefacts, and place all of this in our teacher learning community. Many of the attendees added video links as their artefacts, so I have listed them here for quick access. These videos capture what, I believe, best describes teaching and learning in the 21st Century. These videos focus on the skills that students need or what teachers see as vital skills for both teachers and learners. I could tell from these pre-assignments that we were going to focus quite heavily on 21st century skills.
1. A vision of K-12 today
2. A vision of 21st century teachers
3. What teachers make by Taylor Mali
4. Three steps
5. Learning to change, changing to learn http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tahTKdEUAPk&feature=player_embedded
One of the PIL Institute attendees from the UK, Dan Roberts, had this grand idea to visually collate information about each person attending the Institute before we arrived, and linking it to Bing maps, so that we could get to know something about each other. He suggested we use a website called About.me.com to write a bit about ourselves. I thought this was a great idea. You can sign up to this free website (About.me.com) and write something about yourself and how to contact you, and you can add a photo background. It literally takes 5 minutes. So, we were asked to create one and put the link in our teacher learning community website. The person who suggested this, Dan, has a really interesting profile. http://about.me/chickensaltash. Well, I tried it out and signed up http://about.me/fionabeal What was interesting, I thought, was the way Dan linked these profiles to a Bing map so that we could see the spread of teachers and where they come from. You can view this on http://binged.it/mVOYKh. Once you click on the person’s name you can click on ‘more info‘ and you’ll be taken to their about.me page. Dan is still adding details of everyone, but as he says, it is a great way to visually connect and possibly even collaborate in the future. Oh gosh, I love innovative approaches to things…
Our third pre-assignment has been to find out about and prepare for a TeachMeet. When I was preparing for a ‘PD in your PJs’ talk recently I came upon this concept of TeachMeets and EdCamps which are apparently taking off in the USA, and now I will be involved in one! It is an explosive way of sharing integration-with-Technology practices, teachers teaching teachers about ideas that have worked for them. In Britain it often happens from – 7 informally in a pub! The time is set – ours is to be 3 minutes and we will be presenting these ideas to the 100 United States innovative Teacher competition finalists in Redmond. (The finals takes place while we are in Redmond).
Here is the video we have been asked to view before we gt to Redmond:
A second pre-assignment for Partners in Learning is to research and write about our views on 21st century learning and 21st century teaching, and to submit an artefact that demonstrates this. Well, I am very aware that we are living in a digital age where our students are incredibly digitally-minded, and of course education will have to start incorporating this more and more if it wishes to impact this generation. I am going to put an artefact here in the form of a You Tube video. This is the type of learner we will be dealing with in schools soon ultimately.
When I think of 21st century skills I think of core curriculum expressed in collaborative learning, project-based learning, with connections to the community, research-driven, using technology and multimedia. higher order thinking skills, interdisciplinary… I think ISTE’s NETS STANDARDS sums up the required skills so well.
http://www.iste.org/standards.aspx
To me 21st century teaching is about being relevant in the age in which we live. It is the social networking age, the age of collective intelligence that takes us so much further than we can go on our own, the age of giving, sharing and collaborating. Thus our education system needs to integrate these values and technologies with the curriculum and prepare our digitally-minded students for their future in a rapidly changing world. I have used this Ted video in another post previousy, but to me it just sums up our age so well, that I am adding it again! http://www.ted.com/talks/gel_gotta_share.html) .
The fifty teachers from around the globe who have been selected to attend the inaugural Partners in Learning Institute at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle have been announced, and I am one of them! Whoopee!!!! What can be more exciting than that to a Cape Town teacher! There are THREE of us from South Africa which is even more exciting, as I know the other two teachers, and we will be spending the last week of July in Redmond, Washington. The fifty of us have been communicating and getting to know each other on the Partners in Learning Network, and we have also have four pre-assignments to complete. Mine are done fortunately and I am going to write posts about them. (That is the beauty of blogging – you can post things here and have them at your fingertips). So, USA, here I come!!!!! For the next while I will be writing posts under PIL institute #1-? to record my experiences.
Photosynth is a free Microsoft graphics programme that I have only just started to get to know. It is so simple to use yet it is so amazing to see how it seamlessly connects all the photos you take in a 360 degree turn. One of our pre-assignments for the Partners in Learning Institute is to create a photosynth of our schoool location. Today I sent students in pairs to select a location at the school and take lots of photos just standing in one spot and turning slowly full circle. They loved the experience. I have been uploading the photos to the photosynth site and am excited to see that you can also embed them in a blog. That’s what I am going to try now:
Wow, look how nicely it embeds. I think this is a great programme and must definitely incorporate it in some of my lessons.
I have just attended a most memorable SchoolNet/Intel “ICT in the classroom” social-networking national conference hosted at St John’s School in Johannesburg last week. The Conference was held in the heart of winter and who would have thought Johannesburg could be even colder than Cape Town, but it was! I really appreciated the lovely St John’s school venue, as everything was so close and it was easy to navigate oneself around.
The hostel was right there in the middle of everything, and it used fingerprint recognition for entrance, so one didn’t have to worry about keys! The beds were ever so comfortable and the underfloor heating in the rooms made such a difference. I gave four presentations at the conference, and it was great to discover my venues were just ‘down the passage’ from the hostel, so to speak. Speaking of presentations I think I will add mine at this point from Slideshare so that I have them all in one place.
The Conference itself was very well-organized by Gerald Roos and the SchoolNet team. Everything seemed to happen seamlessly without a hitch, as far as I could see. The presentations looked very interesting and there was a great variety to choose from. The online booking that took place before the conference left everyone knowing exactly where they stand. The door keepers did a good job in making sure that only the people who had booked were the ones who were allowed to enter the sessions. In the keynote sessions Dezlin Jacobs, one of the SchoolNetters, held us spellbound with her housekeeping antics.
The keynote speakers were absolutely superb. They were well-known presenters from around the globe – Naomi Harm (http://blog.innovativeeducator.us/), John Davitt (http://www.davittlearning.net/), Jane Hart (http://janeknight.typepad.com/) and (Shelee George King via Skype). Wow their sessions were SO good. I managed to go to two of Naomi Harm’s classroom presentations as well, and wouldn’t have missed those for the world. The one on Google has left me itching to get back to the classroom next week to try out everything. Naomi Harm is an incredible presenter and so generous with everything. I couldn’t believe how she just gave us her Box.net link containing all her presentations she delivers around the world. It was like being given an overflowing treasure chest. She really epitomizes the sharing nature of the present age. I loved the one Ted video that she showed in her keynote, all about sharing. Here it is: (http://www.ted.com/talks/gel_gotta_share.html) .
I for one have been inspired to adopt this giving approach as fully as I can. What a great way to enhance the furtherance of ICT integration in schools.
Talking about sharing makes me think about the age in which we live – the social-networking age. It’s the age of collective intelligence that takes us so much further than we can go on our own. SchoolNet epitomized at the conference by embracing the help of local volunteers who are known experts in social-networking. Maggie Verster (http://maggiev.edublogs.org/) maintained an amazing conference blog (http://schoolnetsa11.blogspot.com) which kept us all very much on track and in touch. She made sure that:
SchoolNet’s Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/SchoolNet-SA/125361914200052 ),
their Diigo bookmarks (http://groups.diigo.com/group/school_net_sa),
their Slideshare page (http://www.slideshare.net/Schoolnetsa11/presentations) for the presentations, and of course the designated #Schoolnesa11 twitter stream all worked together perfectly in true social-networking fashion. She was ably assisted in the Twitter backchannel by Arthur Preston (http://headthoughts.co.za/), a Worcester headmaster who had not even heard of SchoolNet till a few months ago. I have to admit that I have come away absolutely more enthused and excited about social-networking than ever before as a result of the conference. It was, after all, a social-networking conference and it certainly showed us how it all works together.
I loved the way the conference delegates also observed the Awards Ceremony for the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Forum as a natural part of the conference. What a treat! I think that many of the teachers watching were unaware that such a great competition with such amazing prizes exists. Next year should see a growth in entries as a result.
Last but not least was the opportunity to meet up with Conference buddies from past years and exchange notes and ideas. This networking is always so priceless. I have already signed up four teachers from schools across South Africa for a Grade 3 ‘Flat Stanley’ Literacy project starting this term. The Conference Dinner where we socialised even more was excellent and exuberant. Whaaahooo!!!! (the conference expression of great joy!)
I think this conference has definitely done its bit for the furtherance of technology integration in education. It has shown the amazing thing that teachers are doing in the classroom as they incorporate technology. It has even inspired teachers beyond our borders. I’ll never forget the teacher from Zambia running after me when the conference was over to ask for my presentations. I was able to say to him “Conference blog….Slideshare”, and he knew exactly what I was talking about.
Today the Grade 7s created ‘movies’ about blogging using xtranormal.com to put on their blogs, only to find that xtranomral is no longer free. One person successfully created a movie which generated code and I am putting it below. I suppose all these great applications will eventually start charging a fee!
I love this PD in your PJ thing!!! I have just participated in an awesome SimpleK12 webinar on keeping oneself organised as a teacher using online tools, by Kyle Pace. Some of the tools he mentioned I already know about and use, but there were some great new ideas. This is a very abbreviated summary of Kyle’s talk.
FILE MANAGEMENT
He spoke about Dropbox, Google Docs, and Evernote. I use all three and love them!
WEB RESOURCES
a) He spoke about Diigo (my favourite). I think I must try and follow Kyle Pace on Diigo. When he showed us how it worked he had some amazing looking resources!
b) He mentioned Livebinders. This a lot like One Note in its layout. He gave us the web address of his collection on Using Livescribe in the classroom. The address is: http://bit.ly/livebindersexample. I saw a nice one there on the LiveBinders site on Ipads in Schools by Mike someone.
c) The third tool he looked at was Bridge url (http://bridgeurl.com). Using this site you list like tools together and it saves them as a group.
d) Google Chrome. Apparently Google Chrome syncs on all your computers. It has great educational apps and also great extensions. To learn more about Google Chrome apps he gave this address: http://bit.ly/ericSchromeextensions - a useful blog post.
STUDENT WORK AND SOCIAL LEARNING These are sites that can be used for social collaboration amongst students in a class. I haven’t tried any of them…YET!
a) Edmodo.com b) Collaboriseclassroom.com (Kimberley from SimpleK12 mentioned at this point that they have a past webinar on this application for people to listen to. These are stored at http://simpleK12.com/webinars). c) Sophia.org
KEEPING UP WITH CONFERENCES ON TWITTER I liked the sound of this. Kyle mentioned that Iste is starting next week and we can keep up with it on the following hashtag #iste11. He also mentioned other conference tags – #rscon3 and #blc11.
UTILITIES Here he mentioned:
1) Bit.ly.com to reduce website addresses
2) Readability.com to cut adverts etc out of online reading matter.
3) Viewpure.com to cut advertising clutter out of videos.
4) Google Forms to do polls etc. He showed how amazing Google Forms is for this and how it translates the findings in Google Docs.
Well, this was a very worthwhile webinar and it all happened in my PJs. There was someone else from South Africa attending, from Joburg – Bronwyn D! She must have also been in her PJs! She has just followed me on Twitter! I tried something new as well – I recorded using Audacity while the webinar was going and saved it as an MP3 recording.
One of my Thinkquest teams created a video on ‘baby dumping’ as part of the Adobe Youth Voices program. They also entered the video as part of their Thinkquest project. Adobe kindly sent them certificates which they received in Assembly at school.
Today is the Thinkquest results announcement day and they are huddled around my computer in anticipation! It is so lovely to see the excitement… They have just worked out for themselves on the world clock converter that results will only be made known at 10pm this evening!
Some of my Grade 6s did mammal projects earlier on, so in computer lessons they reduced their informations to what the mammal would actually say about itself and put it into blabberize. This was great fun, I must say and really good for synthesising information.
In May I received an email from Microsoft in the US inviting me to join their inaugural Innovative Teacher network in the Partners-in-Learning interface. This invitation was given to 500 teachers world-wide whom they recognise as being ‘top tier’ teachers. Once you joined the network you would be given an application form to apply for the first ever Global Partners in Learning Institute Professional Development training in Redmond, USA, for a week at the end of July. 50 teachers would be selected from the 500. Well, I have applied!!! Can you imagine anything more exciting than that! Part of the application was that you had to make a two-and-a-half minute movie about yourself and put it on You Tube for the selectors to view. That part was a bit daunting, I must say. Well, that movie has been there for about a month, but this morning I though I should keep a record of it in my blog. So here goes. We should hear about the success of our application towards the end of June.
We had some fun today exploring with fotobabble. This is a great way to record outings or events verbally using a photo as the stimulus.
Ethan reports back on the AOCA visit to the Grade 7s
AOCA came to our school to teach the Grade 7s about the ocean. Ethan reports…
Grade 5J talks about their technology lesson
Tyra’s group
Promise’s group
Taine’s group
Grade 3 was visited by a traffic officer
Mrs Beal asked Zain to give an off-the-cuff report back into the microphone, as she wanted to try out a programme called fotobabble; and he did a really good job. This is our first effort with fotobabble but we hope to iron out the problems and use it a lot more.
I have been thinking recently of the different ways of putting video on to a blog or wiki; and when a friend asked me for some ideas on how to do this I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to summarise what I have tried up to now and what I plan to try in the future! So here goes…
SHORT VIDEOS
This is something I learned very recently through another friend – isn’t it amazing how we learn from one another all the time! In Blogger and Edublogs you can easily add video if it is not too big in size. The problem comes in how your video camera saves files. The files (I think) need to be .wmv to be uploaded. This is where YouTube Downloader comes in handy. This is a free downloadable programme that can convert movies to different formats. You need to select the second option ‘Convert video (previously downloaded) from file’. It works with any video. However Edublogs and Blogger show these videos differently as I will show you now.
Last year the Grade 3s used Photostory 3 (with narration) to make videos about Fish Hoek. This is how Edublogs shows the video: Fish Hoek
(Edublogs says about their video approach, “It doesn’t embed your file in an actual video or audio player in your post; it only inserts a link to the file. When readers click on the link it opens another page where the audio file is played or it downloads the video onto their computer”).
I have to say that I really prefer the Blogger approach with ordinary video clips. Unfortunately Wikispaces only allows embedded video which is what I will discuss next.
SHORT EMBEDDED VIDEOS USING ONE TRUE MEDIA
The one I have tried to date is One True Media. A teacher from the USA visited us and the class spontaneously broke into song so I captured it on my camera and put it into OneTrueMedia
SHORT VIDEOS USING ANIMOTO
With Animoto you are only allowed short videos of 30 seconds free but there is an Animoto Educators account which I have applied for and received. This entitles me to myself and 50 of my students having the Plus account in which we can upload full length videos (maximum 200MB).
Last year one of the Grade 5 classes participated in the ‘Monster project’ and many of the teachers around the world used Animoto to show everyone where they were at. Here is a sample from a Grade 2 class (Miss Hariju) in the USA:
SCHOOL TUBE
I must say that I love School Tube and it is my first choice since it is all about school! I learned about it from another of my PLN friends from America, Bob Greenwood, with whom I was involved in a project. He teaches Grade 2 and he has his own channel on School Tube. He makes so many videos. Take a look: http://www1.schooltube.com/Organization/OrganizationHome.aspx?oid=129695
So that is what I have done. I have applied recently to become a moderator on School Tube and I have my own school channel. I plan to upload everything there. It gives me an embedding code and I put the code in my blogs and in my wikis. Our latest Adobe Youth Voices project has been uploaded there only today after the group inserted royalty free music clips to give the movie more feeling. http://got.im/0JTE
I am running two ‘creative writing and video-making’ computer clubs at school, so I think I will be using this site a lot.
YOU TUBE
I also like using YouTube and I have a channel there as well for all my school videos. Once you have posted a video it gives you a code which you can embed into any blog or wiki. This makes it very easy. Often with school videos I make them private so that they can only be seen by whoever has the YouTube address link. We are on a video swap project with Denmark (Grade 6) and we use YouTube for this. I sometimes think that parents will be happier with the use of School Tube because it is mainly for teachers.
My BIG question at the moment is – how do you compress large .avi files of say 1.8GB in order to upload them easily? (Later…okay, I have just found the answer to this. You put the whole .avi file into Windows Movie Maker and it reduces it amazingly with little loss of quality. It really works…yay!)
This morning I tried out Storybird on one of my Grade 7 classes. All these lovely, free, creative writing applications available on the web are really fascinating, and fantastic! In Storybird, the starting point is art, and you get your inspiration from choosing an interesting piece of art created by an artist. Once you have chosen your piece of art and you start your storybird, you are presented with another myriad of pictures (perhaps as many as 100) that match the original choice in one way or another. I think it is a very clever idea. The class found this very engaging and became quite absorbed in the task. What I love is when they ask if they can carry on at home! Only five completely finished their storybirds in the hour, and I allowed them to publish them without any further editing from me! Risky! Nevertheless here they are:
I heard about Little Bird Tales from my PLN (Personal Learning network) and because everyone has been raving about it, I decided to try it out with the Grade 3s today. It was wonderful! I gave them the topic of ‘My holiday news’ and they first created five pictures about their holiday in Storybook Weaver and saved them as jpegs. Then we went to Little Bird Tales and added the pictures one by one with a sentence or two about each picture. The class loved the experience. WE didn’t get as far as narration – that is for another time!
Please click on the actual pictures of the story below.
Recently I was invited to be a judge in the Microsoft Partners in Learning Competition for Africa. I regarded it as a huge privilege and I learned so much from all the amazing entries which came from all parts of Africa. Those entering had to submit a lesson or project using one or more of the following programmes: Songsmith Autocollage Windows Movie Maker World-wide telescope Photosynth Photostory 3
These are all free programmes from Microsoft. Naturally I had to delve into all the programmes to see their potential, and wow, they are all fantastic.
The entries were really good and the final winner was a team of two High School teachers from Durban Girls College in Kwazulu-Natal, an English teacher and a History teacher. They combined two learning areas and set a project on Apartheid Laws. The girls had to present their projects as a video using Windows Movie Maker. The sample was amazing. As a result of this entry, the two teachers won a trip to the Pan African Microsoft Innovative Teacher Finals which will take place in one of the African countries later this year.
I love it when I do something in computer lessons and the students absolutely love it. This happened today! We went to Talkingpets.org and the students selected a pet of their choice, added accessories and backgrounds, and created a message for the pet to verbalise. They chose a voice to express the message. The programme did the rest of the animations. I did this lesson as a prelude for a more complicated mammal project. In the mammal project the students will research a mammal of their choice, and create a page of information about the mammal. They will then use use Blabberise.com to make their mammal talk (with the students’ own voices) and tell us about itself. The students will create their own animations in the programme.
Here are a few samples from the Talking Pets lesson today.
Today I had the Grade 4s and I asked them to bring the book they are currently reading to computer lessons so that we could record them reading a paragraph. They loved the experience. While the rest of the class was busy writing and illustrating holiday news the readers came up one by one and read into the microphone at my computer. Unfortunately not everyone got a chance to read, but we will continue another time. I think this would make a really nice project – sharing reading with another class. Mmmm!
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