PortablePD.ca

[Looks like Edublogs has changed things in this regard, hopefully for the better, in their latest updgrade.  Another tutorial, Part 3, will come soon!]

One of the most successful aspects of my class blog has been the ability for students to take ownership of a part of it.  Students are able to independently log in and write their own content.  Each student has their own category providing quick access to their work. Students can work on their writing in school and at home provided they have internet access. Whatever posts they wrote would have to be moderated by me before being published to the internet.

This is a follow up to a tutorial I did on this topic on how to make this happen.  Last year, Edublogs changed, rather, created, a business model and introduced a paid level of their blog service.  So, something that used to be done for free now requires you to be a paid subscriber.  However, I completely appreciate the need to try something out before committing to paying for something.

Thankfully, is still possible to set your students as contributors to your blog without being a subscriber.  It is, however, more tedious as it involves creating accounts, usernames and passwords for every students one by one.  This process is automated for subscribers.  In my opinion, it is worth the effort.

Fullscreen version.

Jane and I will be giving a presentation at the next Ontario Educator Meetup.  We’ll be talking about our experiences in integrating technology in our classrooms and talk about our podcasts Portable Radio and Portable PD.  We’ll also dig into our classroom blogs (5nt.ca and 56js.ca) as well.

The presentation will be at 1pm EST, Thursday, July 30 using Adobe Connect.  Click here for time zone information No software to install, just click on the following link close to that time:

http://connect.tcdsb.org/ontmeetup/

The presentation, about an hour, will be recorded and we’ll be sure to get a link up for that as well.

A big thanks to Rob De Lorenzo for making all of this happen.  We are the 8th presentation. All presentations are archived at http://www.ontmeetup.net/.

In this week’s workshop I learned about Wikis. I had created one a while back but never used it. I have been a fan of blogs and wasn’t really all that clear on how to use a Wiki or why I would use one.  I still have some questions and concerns that perhaps you can help me with.

I found that Wikis were really simple to use. We all created accounts with Wikispaces. It is very easy to get an account. Be sure that you specify that you are using it for Educational Use in order to get all the features that you can for free. In the workshop I learned all sorts of little tricks on how to import files and how to create more Wikis. You get a fair bit of space to upload files and pictures. I was really happy to see that my little trick for including Flickr pictures on my pages works with Wikis too (see the screencast on how to do this by clicking here). It is easy to embed video and calendars and to manage the pages and contributors on a Wiki. The idea of collaboration on the Wiki appeals to me but being the control freak that I am, I have some concerns about using a Wiki with my students.

One of the things I really like about my blog is that I approve all the posts and comments that appear on it. Anytime anyone writes anything, their comments or posts wait until I see them and approve them before they appear on the blog for the rest of the world. If I understand it correctly I would not have that ability on a Wiki. I can decide who has permission to change the Wiki or to join in the discussion but once someone writes something it is out there. I understand that I can subscribe to my Wiki so that it alerts me to any changes that I have been made, but I worry that is a little after the fact.

The other concern that I have is that if a contributor writes something inappropriate I can correct it but the changes will always be visible in the history unless I remake the page. I can see how some enterprising students would get a kick out of writing something cheeky, saving it, even by accident or on a dare and then changing it so that their writing appears to be proper on the main page but their naughty exploits are still visible in the history for all to see. I don’t know if I want to be policing this. Sometimes students write things with the best intentions but don’t realize that a turn of phrase or use of words can be read the wrong way. Sometimes students share user ids and passwords with their most trustworthy and bestest friends only to have that trust betrayed and used against them. Having an opportunity for a second look before things go on air has been beneficial to both me and my students on the blog.

This year, I want to get my students collaborating on writing both in my class and with Nathan’s class. I am interested in how you might be using a Wiki with your class. At the moment I am leaning toward using Google Docs for the collaborative work and sticking with the blog for discussion and sharing. Any thoughts??

TeacherTube for Video

Jane and I played around with TeacherTube a couple of years back.  Think of it as YouTube for educators.  We uploaded a couple of videos there, nothing fancy (We used the tempermental, not-so-school-friendly Windows Movie Maker, but that’ll be another post).  I put up a video of a student teacher demonstrating the famous Pepsi/Mentos reaction, a video of some guys traveling the world in a biodeisel firetruck and another video of Leo Brooks working with students on hand drumming.  To my astonishment, my video showing what happens when you mix Mentos and Pepsi has since been viewed over 5000 times. So, I kept digging and checked out Jane’s stats.  Not that we’re competitive or anything…

Jane, always the master educator, made a  couple of videos of students teaching the science of elastic and potential energy (The Comeback Can and the Wind Up Tractor).  Typically, she left me in the dust.  As of this posting, her video, “The Comeback Can” has been viewed over 8981 times.  Not quite viral, but pretty good for a grade 5 science lesson out in the portables.

One of the cons of TeacherTube is the advertising.  I’ve only encountered education related ads, but I still prefer to steer students away from them.  However, embedding these videos in your own blog helps reduce wandering minds.

TeacherTube gives you the necessary code to embed videos into your blog.  Here’s my exploding Pepsi video:

And Jane’s comeback can:

TeacherTube for Audio

It turns out that TeacherTube now hosts MP3 files as well.  For me, this is a big deal.  Jane and I have been on the search for an easy-to-use, free, unlimited storage space solution for our podcasts.  We now have three seasons worth of Portable Radio and one season of Portable PD and are reluctant to take any of it down.  TeacherTube appears to fit all of our needs – even the one about unlimited storage space.  So, fingers crossed, I’ll experiment with uploading our next podcast there.

TeacherTube even gives you the code to embed the audio in your blog.  A nice feature since Edublogs (the provider of this blog) no longer generates a player for audio. Here’s our latest podcast:

I decided in June that since my children were keeping me close to home this year, I would take whatever tech workshops the OCDSB was offering this summer. It was a great decision, I enjoy my weekly trips to Confederation Learning Centre computer lab. Today’s workshop was about Excel. It was called “Advanced Excel” and I don’t mind saying that I was a little nervous about the “advanced” part of the billing. Fortunately, it was all good. I actually figured some stuff out on my own! We imported text, learned about Pivot tables (really cool) and how to tweak some formulas (the IF ones are my favourite). It was a morning well spent.

It was a predominantly secondary teacher crowd. I think there was only one other elementary teacher there. I don’t normally get to hang out with secondary teachers. Our tasks in the workshop were to import student records and have Excel organize the data, sort it and play around with the numbers. The records that we imported included marks like 23/25 for different assignments. We worked on having Excel calculate averages, percent, highest score and lowest score. The secondary teacher beside me was really enjoying all that she could do with the program to organize her marks and classes. I was finding it neat too but I don’t know that I will be using Excel the same way she does.

Over the past few years, I have experienced a lot of change around assessment and reporting. With the reporting that we do, and the comments that we write, anecdotal records now hold more information for me than marks. My mark book that used to have things like 23/25 or 72% has been replaced with copies of rubrics with levels 1,2,3,4 and scrawled comments. I wrestle with how to marry my achievement chart based comments with a final A, B, C or D. I try use Excel to keep this data in some order. While the workshop today was looking at coming up with an overall average to create a final percentage mark, I think that I will be looking at finding the “most recent, highest scores”. I am looking at how to organize my data to sort different level readers into guided reading groups. I am thinking of doing “IF” formulas that colour code my level 4s as red, 3s as blue, 2s as green and 1s yellow in order to differentiate my program. I wonder if I can do that.  =IF(J3i=4=red) … this is going to take some thinking. I didn’t ask at today’s workshop, didn’t want to sound too elementary, pretty colours and all.

I really enjoyed today’s workshop and learned a lot about Excel that I will put to use in ways that make sense to me. But, I wish that I had spent some time speaking with the secondary teachers to find out the mysteries of their jobs and assessment methods. I have always known that elementary and secondary schools are not the same. I began to wonder about how different we are. It made me think about how we don’t really have a dialogue between elementary and secondary teachers. I hope that someone out there sees the “big picture”. I really hope that we are doing things at the elementary level that support our students as they go on. Perhaps we at elementary could learn a few things from our secondary colleagues and vice versa … Oh, oh sounds a bit like crazy talk, too much time spent with IF,OR,NOT,TRUE,FALSE, and AND.

I have spent the day at an excellent workshop that was offered by my school board (Ottawa Carleton District) on the Small Wonder camera. I have used one before but I like going to workshops to see what I haven’t discovered myself or to learn what other people are planning to do with their classes and the technology. It is also a great opportunity to reconnect with people who I haven’t seen for a while.

We spent the morning playing around with the cameras. The cameras are fairly inexpensive, about $100.00. They are really easy to use. Big red button means record. Delete means delete. On and off, well they let you turn it on or off. Kids would have no problem using them. I can think of many different uses for my class next year. There is one downside though…. Movie maker!

The Small Wonder cameras are plug and play making it easy to import video, and still pictures, into the computer. Once on your computer the material can be edited and combined to make a “movie” that can be shared or uploaded. Movie maker is what we are using to do the editing and so far today Movie Maker HATES ME. I have copied my video onto the computer. I have created a folder to store it all in and I save every two seconds because Movie Maker keeps crashing. I don’t know if I want to put my students through this.

The advantages of Movie Maker are that it is free and that it is already on my school computers but I think these might be outweighed by the crashing issue. Does anyone have a solution for me? Please don’t point me to iMovie. All the computers in our schools are pc. I would love to hear how others deal with the crashing problem.

And for your entertainment, I was going to add my little video created this morning with the Small Wonder and Movie Maker. However, I saved all my video files, I saved my Movie Maker project but…I did not do the final step of finishing the video in Movie Maker to make it a final copy. I thought that I could take it all home, do some finishing touches to the project and then publish something truly great and Oscar worthy. Now on my home computer I can see all my video clips in my storyboard but when I play my video I just get the sound and a black screen. AAARGH! This is all good learning, I guess. It would be really frustrating to encounter these problems taking student work back and forth from home and school.

The long cool summer drinks are helping. Thanks for the red wine suggestion Roger.