PortablePD.ca

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.

Here’s our latest Green Team Here’s our latest Green Team announcement promoting Earth Hour at WEJ! It’s been airing all week over the morning announcements and is posted on our school blog site (www.wej1.blogspot.com)

Listen

Shaw

Sonia Manchen, one of our diligent TLLP workshop participants, has shared this worksheet to use with that best seller “Our Class Podcast”.

Hi Nathan and Jane!

 We finally have our “How to” science podcasts posted on our classroom blogsite (http://www.wej33.blogspot.com/)! This project was a procedural writing/reflection piece created from knowledge we gained during our trip to the Museum of Science and Technology. We attended workshops on stability and forces. The bed tracks used for the podcasts were developed as a class on a SMART board using Acid Express (thanks for that latest TLLP workshop session!). A great shared lesson integrating technology and music!

 Thanks again for the PLC, my students are truly benefiting from the PD provided by you!

 Cheers, back to reports!

Jamie Barteaux

Grade 3 – CCT – W.E. Johnston P.S.

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.

Here are some works of art made by my own kids.

This was created by my three year old daughter.

And this was created by my five year old son.

As always, you would need to have administrator privileges to install this on your computer.

Hi Nathan and Jane and everyone

Here is my classes blog. It is with the French program using the plays from AIM, and with the students making their own radio broadcast with the weather, sports, ect.

The address is

http://radiosalleneuf.edublogs.org/

There are more pictures on our school website as I want to keep a lot of the space for the podcasts.

Our school web site is

http://www.munsteres.ocdsb.ca

and click on “Francais” in the “classroom News” area. There will soon be a link between these two pages.

Hope everyone is well. Colleen

Hi Nathan and Jane,

I have recently been delving into the blog scene for my classroom. I figured I would share as it has our podcasts posted there, as well as some other resources for parents and educators. It is a work in progress, but I am happy with the ease of creation and editing that Blogger has to offer! The site isn’t linked to our school page as of yet as I am still in my “Beta” version of the site and learning all it has to offer. Unfortunately, a lot of the content is blocked by the board filter even though it is educational and safe for viewing. Check it out!

http://wej33.blogspot.com

Thanks again for the inspiration with regards to the podcasts!

Jamie
——————————————————
Jamie Barteaux
Grade 3 – CCT – W.E. Johnston P.S.

Here’s a message from OCDSB teacher, Lorraine Montgomery:

Hi all,

Please do visit our classroom podcast site:

We recorded our presentation from Tuesday and also now have our first Point of View podcast uploaded for listening.  My students would love to have comments posted for them to read on Monday when we go to lab.

Cheers!

Lorraine Montgomery
Dunlop PS 5/6

Hi Jane and Nathan,

More success from WEJ! We are loving the equipment and PD we have received as it is paying dividends!

Recently, my grade 3 class had a parent volunteer into present about her grandfather – a veteran of WW1 – Vimy Ridge.

To keep the students involved and active in the presentation (which was easy she is a great presenter) I borrowed a 5W’s and H graphic organizer to help the students write down information they heard during the presentation.

After the presentation was done, in small groups of 4 or 5 I had them share their organizers with each other to add to what they had written down. We then took up up together on the Smartboard. Next, I assigned one aspect (Who, what , where..) to each small group for them to convert the jots into a paragraph or two. Then, they decided who would say what and we recorded the tracks. I did most of the editing this time in Audacity and layed the music bed, but I modelled it for them on the Smartboard with hopes that after a few tries they will be able to do the majority of the editing. Roughly 200 minutes from start to finish, with a little extra time for me to polish.

Overall, this was a fun, fast and fruitful activity. The kids (and parents) really do love to hear the finished product, Check it out! As Jane mentioned it is on our school website’s parent page at

http://wej4.blogspot.com/

The other brief clip “The Call” was recorded using the DVR [digital voice recorder] we got in the package as well. Although the quality wasn’t very good because of all the excitement, etc. going on in the background the content is truely Canadian! This was an enrichment project for a student to gather some audio (interviews and play by play) from our ministick league final game. “The Call” is the winning goal from the overtime shootout!:-)

Thanks again Nathan and Jane! Podcasting rocks!

Jamie Barteux

W. Erskine Johnston Public School

Shaw Jackson is a participant in our TLLP podcast workshops.

Hi Nathan,

I did a podcast with our school’s EarthCare Green Team advertising our upcoming Festive Light Exchange. We are playing this brief announcement over the PA system each morning this week. Parents can also hear this podcast at our school’s website (wej1.blogspot.com) – click the Parents link.

It did not take too much time at all to create this (writing the script, recording the voices, editing). We used the portable audio recorder to record the students’ voices. The music was downloaded from Soundsnap.com.

Shaw Jackson
WEJ

P.S. Just wanted to let you know that another teacher here at WEJ, Pat Ollevier also worked on our Festive Light podcast (we run the Green Team together). She was eager to learn about audacity!

Download