PortablePD.ca

On September 21^st, OPHEA, the Ontario Physical and Health Education Association, launched a new resource to support teachers, students and parents in grades 4-6 on how to be safe in their use of technology and internet resources. Connect[ED] provides online video, lessons and resources to help students in the development of their own online practices and safe behaviours relating to netiquette, security, personal privacy and relationships. The website, http://www.reallifeonline.ca/, is very comprehensive. OPHEA has done its homework. They draw information from a variety of resources and experts including the Physical Education and Health curriculum document, The Language Arts curriculum document, Marc Prensky (Article: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants), and the Media Awareness Network (http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/index.cfm), to name a few.

 This is a web-based program (it is also available as a DVD) that covers the topics of Netiquette (peer pressure, reputation risk), Security and Privacy (passwords, personal information, digital permanence), and Online Relationships (cyberbullying, boundaries, anonymity, inappropriate photos/text, luring and online gaming). Each lesson is supported with background information, additional resources and curriculum expectations from both the Health and Physical Education Curriculum document and the Media Literacy portion of the Language Curriculum document and assessment and evaluation suggestions. Each unit overview contains three categories of information:

         What Will the Students Learn?

         How Will I know What the Students Have Learned?

         How Will Assessment and Instruction Be Organized For Student Learning?

There is also an accompanying section for parents that provides strategies and questions for dealing with the topic of online safety at home.

 The lessons include video episodes that are done in animation and live action footage. I found the animation to be a little simplistic, but the messages are very clear and age appropriate. The live action footage is effective, particularly the interview with an unidentified victim of cyberbullying and a school principal about the consequences of inappropriate use of technology in the grade 6 videos. It is helpful that written transcripts are also provided for each video.

 This resource is available in both French and English. It is a sister resource to the grade 7 and 8 courses Cybercops http://www.ophea.net/programs-services/more-resources/cybercops which are also available as a free download in French and English.

      Looking for a way to bring a bit of a global view into your classroom? Here is a simple idea that I have used for a few years that I might have stolen from Kathy Cassidy.

She is a classroom teacher in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Canada who describes herself as a “Grade one teacher inviting the world into her classroom.”

One of the things that Kathy does in her grade 1 class and that I have done in my grade 5/6 classroom is to use clocks. Bring in 3 or 4 wall clocks and set them to different times for different places around the world. It is a simple idea that can open up all kinds of classroom discussion possibilities and it makes your classroom look cool, like a newsroom. I found my clocks a few years ago at IKEA. The Rusch Wall clock sells for $2.99 but isn’t currently in stock at the Ottawa Ikea, although I am sure that there are other places where you can find inexpensive wall clocks.

I have used my clocks to mark places that we’re learning about in class or talking about in current events. I have also used them when students go on trips during the school year. I set it to the time zone where they’re visiting. I have also used them to show the students the time in classrooms around the world where we have blogged with other students. They’ve been a great help in my unit on telling time and time zones as well.

A simple idea that is cool and has many different applications. Don’t waste any more time…get out there and put up clocks on your classroom walls .

For more information about Kathy Cassidy, her class and her professional blog, click here. (The photo is of the clocks in Kathy’s classroom.)

  Last year my grade 5/6 class and I walked around the world with the Global Children’s Challenge. Each student was given a (free) pedometer and a little record booklet in which to record their steps. For 50 days we recorded how many steps the class had walked and entered the information on the Global Children’s Challenge website. Last year our journey started at Niagara Falls, Ontario and quickly moved to Florida, the jungles of South America, Australia, Africa and parts of Europe. As our steps added up each new destination was revealed with information and pictures of where we were, the people, land and interesting facts. Through the website we were able to track our progress and compare it to students from other schools around the world. It was interesting to see how competitive my class became as we compared our progress to that of other Ottawa Carleton District School Board Schools. We didn’t go nearly as far as Nathan’s class. He was always a couple of locations ahead of us.

The challenge is open to classes of students between the ages of 8 and 12. Registration is being accepted until August 31, 2011 for this years challenge which begins on September 15th. I believe space is limited but last year all the classes that I knew of that had applied were accepted. The pedometers arrive in a box, enough for each student in the class and a few extras in case some are faulty, break or get lost.

Some ways I used the program with my class:

Daily Physical Activity – We did a lot of walking around the school, running and jumping. On indoor days when the weather didn’t allow us to go outside, we did follow the leader trips up and down the stairs in the school, and through the hallways. Some of my more active students liked to walk on the spot at their desks as they did their silent reading work. I found that the kids liked to record what their steps were at the start of an activity and then see how many steps they had added on at the end. The timing of the event coincided really well with our Terry Fox Run. We recorded our steps as part of our preparation for the run to see if we could get more steps in the same amount of time as we trained.

Math – There is so much that we were able to do in math with the pedometers.

• - guess the number games using to reinforce place value (Who has a 3 in the thousands place? ).
• -order the numbers from smallest to largest.
• -addition, subtraction and division of really big numbers.
• -word problems (If the class travels at an average rate of 12 670 steps a day and there are 10 000 steps in 8 kilometers about how many days will it take for us to walk 50 kilometers?)
• students keep personal graphs of their progress…keep a class graph
• estimation
• graph the populations of the different locations

There is a real cool factor about having your podcast in iTunes.  It makes it easy for people to find you, subscribe to your show and easily put your show on their iPod, iPhone and Ipad. And, more importantly, it’s FREE!

Here’s how you do it.  This works for Mac and PC:

1. Get set up with Feedburner

The first thing to do is to get an account with Feedburner. This is a free service that does all the mumbo jumbo scripting that needs to be done for iTunes to recognize a podcast. Nathan did try to script it himself following iTunes instructions but I don’t think it was a pretty experience (he still twitches a bit).

A Feedburner account will give you a Podcast Feed URL that leads iTunes to the stuff that it needs and understands. The feed URL for our Portable Radio podcast looks like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PortableRadio

Another advantage to having a Feedburner account is that it will also give you statistical information on how many visitors your are getting and what episodes they are listening to.

Once your account with Feedburner is set up, find the “Optimize” tab and select “SmartCast”:

Here’s how we filled it out for our Portable Radio podcast:

Find your Podcast Feedburner feed by clicking on “Edit Feed Details”.  This is the URL you will be giving to iTunes.

2.  Submit your Feedburner Podcast URL to iTunes.

If you don’t already have it, download and install iTunes.  Click on the “iTunes Store” icon on the left menu bar:

Then click on Podcasts at the top of the screen:

Once you are on the Podcast page it is just a matter of finding the “Podcast Quick Links side bar”.  Click on “Submit a Podcast”.

You will first be asked to provide the Podcast Feed URL that Feedburner created for you:

Following this, you’ll be asked to sign into to your account.  If you already buy songs and such from iTunes, use that account.  Otherwise, you’ll need to create an account.  You will be asked for your credit card information.  However, there is no money involved in submitting or subscribing to podcasts. Apple is just hoping you might decide to buy a couple of songs and videos along the way.

The podcast will go through some sort of mysterious approval process.  You should hear from Apple within a couple of days saying that the process is complete and your podcast can now be found on iTunes.

To check, search the name of your podcast:

All going well, your podcast will appear (along with a couple other ones with similar names):

Let us know when you have your podcast up and are ready for subscribers. We are always happy to promote education related podcasts.

I had a question from a teacher about how to add categories to a blog. Categories are great for organizing your different blog posts. On my classroom blog, MrsSmith.ca, and on Nathan’s, MrToft.ca, we have given each of our students a category so that mom and dad can easily find the work that their child has done.

There are several ways to create categories. One way is to do it on the fly. As you create posts you can create categories to place them in. On my admin page there is a place where I select the category that I want my post to appear in on the right hand side of the screen. At the bottom you will see +Add New Category. Click there and it will create whatever categories you want.

Another way to create categories is to Activate the Advanced Admin on the blog. To do this, click on the button on the upper right hand corner of the blog. This will reveal a whole lot of new tools along the left hand side of your post.

Click on the word Posts and a drop down menu will appear. Click on Categories and you will be able to add any categories that you want. NOTE: CATEGORIES WILL NOT APPEAR ON THE BLOG UNLESS YOU HAVE ASSIGNED A POST TO THE CATEGORY. They will just hang around until you need them.

Another thing to check it that your blog theme that you have choosen supports displaying categories. You can change the appearance of your blog any time without fear of losing any of your posts, pages or categories. Again you can access Appearance in the Advance Admin area of the blog along the left hand side. I will write more on adding Categories and other Widgets to the blog at another time.

There are times that, even after you have exported your Audacity project as an MP3, you will discover your file is too large to upload.  For example, a podcast running over 15 minutes in length can be around 25 MB.  If you’re uploading this file to your Edublogs account, that is a problem.  Edublogs only allows files sizes up to 20MB.

Here’s a solution:

1. With Audacity open Edit/Preferences.

2.  Click on the “File Formats” tab.

3.  Change the bit rate to a lower number than the default of 128.  I’d avoid going lower than 64 as the decreased sound quality will be very noticeable.

4.  Now when you export your Audacity project as an MP3 the file size will be smaller.

Nathan and I are always really happy to share with our colleagues. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to present at the OCETF PD day. If you require more information please don’t hesitate to BEAM us.

Links from our February 18th presentation:

• PortableRadio.ca is our podcast site.  You can also find it on iTunes.
• MrToft.ca and MrsSmith.ca are our class blogs.
• Edublogs.org is the provider we use for our various websites.  Let us know if you create a blog and we’ll work our magic to take off the advertising.
• Audacity is the recording software that we use. It is free and works on both Mac and PC platforms   http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/windows
• Lame is what you need to export files as mp3 with Audacity   http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/
• Click here for posts we have written dealing with specific questions about Audacity.
• Compfight.com and Flickr.com are great places to find pictures.  We make a point of using only Creative Commons licensed pictures and linking to their source.
• Acid Express is a music program that uses loops to create compositions.http://www.acidplanet.com/downloads/xpress/
• Levelator is a small program that balances the volume of your audio.  This is really handy in giving all your podcasts a consistent volume. Just drop the wav file into the program and it will save a new, balanced version of your audio.  http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator
• JewelBeat.com is an example of where to go to find copyright free music.  Visit here for other sites we have found to be useful.
• This is the splitter that allows you to connect five headphones to any device with an earphone jack.  It’s called the Belkin RockStar.  I got mine at Staples for under $20.00.
• Here’s a link to the Portable Radio documentary we showed today
• Click here for an introductory lesson with Audacity you might do with your students. You’ll hear Nathan describe the lesson towards the end of the podcast.  Here’s the worksheet that goes with it.

I have been lurking around blogs lately. I know that I should probably be leaving a comment whenever I visit but sometimes it is just nice to hang out in the background and see what people are up to.

I like visiting other teacher created blogs to see what they are doing with their classes and what links they are using. One thing that sometimes gets in the way of my lurking is if I click on a link I have a problem getting back to the blog. If I click the back arrow I only go a little way back and if I close the page my browser closes and I have to start over again. Something that bloggers could do to help me in my lurking would be to make the links open in a new window.

If you use Edublogs it is just a matter of selecting that from a drop down menu where you make your link. It looks like this:

By selecting Open link in a new window in the Target area you let me look around your links, close the window and be right back at your site (which is where I really want to be). Please help me with my lurking.

P.S. Thank you to all the teachers who have their blogs out there for me to lurk around. I get my best ideas and resources from you.

NOTE:  We’ve updated this post to include the links we mentioned in Thursday’s workshops as well.

There was a great deal of conversation about Finnish pancakes today.  Apparently, for those who are far more knowledgeable than Jane or me, this is a delicacy not to be missed while here in Thunder Bay.  We look forward to becoming part of the cool breakfast eating crowd tomorrow morning and discovering what all the fuss is about.  We understand the pancakes are particularly…flat.

We enjoyed working with everyone today at Kingsway Park Public School – Hyde Park Campus. We hope you came out of the day with some ideas to pursue.  We are more than happy to answer questions.  If you want to brag about a blog or podcast you’ve created, by all means, brag away.  We’ll share it here on the PortablePD.ca site.

As promised here are the links we mentioned over the course of the day:

10Dollars.ca – This is where we pay around $12 each year to register our domain names. It makes it a lot easier with 10 year olds in the class to tell them to go to MrsSmith.ca or MrToft.ca than the actual longer web address. It will tell you if your domain is taken or not. Just a little tip: with a name like MrsSmith.ca, check that MrsSmith.com and MrsSmith.org are “safe”sites for kids to stumble upon!

Acid Xpress  – free software that allows you to create your own original music.  It’s kind of like painting with sound.  We like it because we can save it to MP3 and use it with Audacity when putting together podcasts.

Animoto - “Turn your photos and videos into pure amazing Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. Fast, free and shockingly easy.”

Audacity – freeware program that is used to record and edit audio. We use this software to edit all of our Portable Radio podcasts. Remember, you will need to download the program and the LAME MP3 encoder.

Compfight.com – A site that simplifies finding Creative Commons licensed pictures from Flickr.

CutePDF – Free software that creates PDF out of your documents.  If you can print it, you can make a PDF out of it.  The program installs itself as a printer.  To make a PDF you go to “Print” within the application you are using (i.e. Word) and select the CutePDF printer.  Press print and a prompt will come up asking where you want to save your PDF document.  Very handy for posting newsletters, homework sheets, etc. on blogs and websites.

Dropbox - Online backup, file sync and sharing made easy.”  We use the free version of this on a daily basis.

Edublogs – a blog provider for educators and students.  We use it to host MrToft.ca, MrsSmith.ca, PortablePD.ca, Portable Radio and PortableRecorder.ca

Flickr -  You can upload your own photos but what I use it for the the creative commons licensed photos that I can put on my blog posts. Be sure if you are using photos that you do the advanced search and take only licensed pictures. Remember to link back to the picture on Flickr or give credit in some way to the photographer.

Format Factory This is free software that converts all popular video, audio, and picture formats.  I like it because it works!