I know – another strange name. It conjures up images of manic bus drivers armed to the hilt with paint brushes, easels and pastels just waiting to pounce on the first person who dares to criticise their art.
But it is not.
Art Rage is a painting software. It allows you to mix paints, work with palette knives, pencil, marker and more. The free version offers quite a bit of scope and allows one to save their work without any watermark or limitation.
This is a fabulous tool for serious artists and those of us (like me) who just like to doodle.
Nathan introduced me to the Common Craft videos a few years ago. Lee and Sachi Lefever create short and elegantly simple videos on tech and other subjects. The videos are all done with paper cut outs and voice overs. Well worth a visit.
We Make Videos
Our videos are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand. We use a whiteboard-and-paper format we call Paperworks that is designed to cut out the noise and stick to what matters.
We are dedicated to building a library of videos that are focused on helping influencers and educators create change through better explanations.
PortableRadio.ca is a student podcast Jane and I have been producing for the past three years. We’re very pleased to be bragging to you about this…
Nathan and Jane,
Congratulations! Your podcast was selected for a Kidcast Award in the Editorial POV category! I apologize for how long this contest has drug on, but we’ve finally wrapped it all up. The judges were very impressed and complimentary of you and your students work. I, for one, enjoy holding up your podcast as an example for teachers and students everywhere. Thank you for engaging your students in this medium and helping them develop their sense of inquiry, argument, point of view, and communication. You are giving them gifts that will anchor them solidly in their future.
Your trophy is on its way and should arrive soon!
Thank you again for you participation! I wish you continued success with your show!
Congratulations to Krista and her family on the safe arrival of Abigail. Abigail is now officially our youngest TLLP participant and we hope to meet her at one of our meetings.
TA DA!!!! I realize that it is not a very Canadian thing to toot your own horn but…We are very excited to announce that our second book is now available through Scholastic’s Moving Up Literacy Place Series.
Our latest book is called Web Tools for Kids. We were so thrilled to finally see the book. When we last saw it it was a horribly marked up, edited to death Microsoft Word document. We had no idea what the layout was going to be or what the graphic design would look like. Nathan was particularly interested in seeing the final copy as he came up with the concepts for most of the cartoons that appear in the book.
This is a grade 6 level guided reading text. It is set up as a glossary/dictionary of different web tools. We have included information about blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and virtual worlds, to name a few of the topics that are covered.
We couldn’t resist taking this picture. Scholastic had our books on display at a PD day for the elementary teachers in our board and there were our books! Just squint, Nathan’s pretty helpless when it comes to using the camera feature on his cellphone.
Frequent visitors to PortablePD.ca will be familiar with our screencasts. Screencasts are movies of your desktop and come in handy when explaining how to deal with software and websites. Jing offers free and very easy to use software for creating such movies.
Until recently, we weren’t able to embed these screencasts directly into our blog. Instead we would have create a link to another website. Being self-centred types, Jane and I much prefer to keep our readers on our site at all times!
Predictably enough, I’ve created this screencast explaining how to embed it into a post.
Click here to see a larger version (or right click to download it).
This post has been written on “Using tools like VoiceThread, Voki, mystudiyo, Animoto, SlideShows, Google Documents with students and embedding in blogs posts” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition.
Something that out students really enjoy looking at on our class blogs (56js.ca and 5nt.ca) are the world maps with the little dots that show where visitors to our site are from. Nathan and I both use Feedjit to track our visitors. It is available as a free download and is easy to use. All I did was to copy the HTML code from the site and paste it into the design, widget area of the blog. It works well with edublogs. Feedjit has other formats that you can choose from. My class is still hoping to get a dot on Africa!
I’m now totally in the throw of the podcasting thrill / extravaganza / craze. It REALLY is FUN – FUN – FUN!!! I’m completely hooked!
Alright… so I started a guided reading book with a bunch of really smart grade 2 readers. We extended by making travel brochures. Yet again, taking it to another level and the best level of all… PODCASTING!!! Each student in the group will make their own travel commercial podcast for the country they researched and made a brochure for.
I’ve been taking it slowly, learning as I go. I get it now… and LOVE it! I’ve recorded all the voices, downloaded them, I take each kid out of class individually so they can pick their sounds, and we build their sound effects and background music together. I will have a total of 14 once I’m finished with this group of fine readers and podcasters from our 3 gr.2 classes.
I proposed that we show these country commercials off on our school web page. They are 30 second podcasts at most. I’ve been saving as wav and mp3 files.
My next cautious step is getting them on the website. How the heck do I do this??? No idea where to start. Help!!!
