Adrianna started working with a partner but her partner was ill or away on a trip during a large part of the assignment so Adrianna did the project herself. Using Audacity, she recorded herself asking all the questions. Then she recorded herself as Sir John Franklin and answered the questions. Using the Change Pitch effect in Audacity she altered her voice for the Sir John Franklin part. In editing she went from the question track to the answer track. She added a little ghostly music and I think that she has put together a very strong project.

Audacity is a powerful tool and motivator for the students in my class.

Listen to Adrianna’s interview with Sir John Franklin by clicking here.

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

We follow a Recorder Karate program. In addition to teaching the class in the fundamentals of playing the recorder, the students work at their own rate to earn “karate belts”. The belts are pieces of embroidery floss tied onto the ends of the recorders. The students really like to collect as many belts as they can. Nathan has set up the site with the requirements for each belt. The students need to identify notes by name,  clap a rhythm and play a song. There is sheet music available on the site for each song and a play along, karaoke mp3. When the student is ready, they come to one of us to do their belt test.

One plan that Nathan has for the site is to replace the canned recorder music with recordings of our students playing the songs. What a great way to motivate the kids and to put those digital voice recorders to work. The students can master a piece or two of music and become the “play along” for everyone else.

This wasn’t Nathan’s original idea, but he has done a fair bit of work on it. Portable PD is a place to share ideas about using podcasting and audio recording. This is one idea that I have found invaluable and I know that others will too.

Click here to get to Nathan’s page. Keep checking the site and listening to Portable Radio. We will be posting our students’ playing in the near future.

For more information about this program visit:

Plank Road Publishing

The Complete Recorder Resource Kit

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.

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.

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.

Their blog is available at: http://www.commoncraft.com/blog

Here is a their latest video: Computer Hardware in Plain English

I have this amazing idea to put together a little reading group with some of my students in the new year, a la literature circle idea. I don’t think that I will do it with the entire class to begin with…I have been burned before. As a little incentive to keep them going and on topic I will have them record their discussions about the novel. Ah! What would be even smarter would be to start with short stories, then if things bog down with the group we won’t be trudging through some lengthy tome. My plan is to then take the recorded discussions, and use them as series on the class podcast. I think to get it up and running I will start working directly with the during some of the independent reading time when the rest of the class is doing their silent reading. This is the time that I have been using for guided reading anyway but I haven’t recorded the discussions. I would love to see groups work independently on this but we have to start somewhere.

I will keep you posted as to how things are going. Hopefully the results will be up on Portable Radio at some point and my guided reading lessons will have a little more life to them.

Wish me luck. (I’ll need it).

Nathan found a website that gives a framework to write an “instant I can’t write a poem” poem. It was great and got all of the students working on coming up with excuses as to why they couldn’t write. They quite enjoyed it and everyone was able to produce their own poem. Some sutdents changed the idea around a bit and did “Why I Can’t Walk the Dog” or Why I Can’t do My Homework”. Having the digital recorders available in our classrooms meant that we were able to record the students reading their creations and we will use the recordings on future PortableRadio.ca podcasts. Click here to visit the site “I Can’t Write a Poem” site.

Mary Jane Johnson, a special education teacher at our school, gave us the idea for the “I come from …” poem. This poem follows a formula. The first line is a favourite food. The second line is a place you pass by every day. The third line is a family saying. The fourth line is a treasured item and the fifth line is the place where you keep the item. Again my students really enjoyed the activity. Everyone of them wanted to have their poem published on our class blog, 56js.ca Here are some of the results:

I am from…

by Remi

Leg of lamb and Yorkshire pudding
Park
You can’t get married till you’re 30Princess music box
On my dresser

These little poems allowed everyone to be successful and have something to record or publish in a short period of time. The students enjoyed the activity and we had a great discussion about what a poem is and how you often have to think carefully about poetry to get the entire picture of what the author is trying to say.

Podcasting and blogging without a big song and dance!

By the way…please consider voting for Portable Pd in the Edublog Best Group Blog award category. Click on this link to cast your vote.

The real teachable moment in all of this came when, during our writing period, a glazier arrived in our portable to fix our broken window. One of my students immediately came up with the idea to interview our visitor about his job and how he does his work. Having the digital recorder in the classroom meant that we were able to take advantage of this opportunity. We learned about all the steps involved in taking the glass out, cutting glass, replacing the glass and sealing the window. Along with my class I learned about the glazier’s job and the students taught him a bit about podcasting. You can hear the results of this encounter at our student produced podcast PortableRadio.ca – Episode 3 Season 3.

Another window of opportunity for Nathan and me has come with the “Edublog Best Group Blog” nomination. We are both very pleased (and a bit surprised) to get this honour. This nomination has given PortablePd.ca a little more “press”. Our goal with this site has been to get the word out and to provide support for teachers who are interested in podcasting without having to reinvent the wheel. We would appreciate your support in this. You can vote by clicking here.

….continuing the conversation.

This animation was very easy to make.  Honest.  Try it out yourself at goanimate.com.

I don’t plan on setting my grade 5 students loose on the site for the time being. There are too many bikini-clad characters, bars (of the drinking establishment kind), weapons and the like.  Most entertaining, which, of course, is a tad risky for our ultra-conservative sensibilities.

There is mention on the site, of creating a teacher-friendly version.  I’m hopeful that will happen.

Still, it’s a fun way to hook people, young or old, and the results are pretty professional. I can see it being used at the start of a presentation or lesson.

Another con: Edublogs and Wordpress don’t allow the movies to be embedded properly.  The Firefox browser almost seems to work – but doesn’t.  Internet Explorer just creates an empy box. This issue is discussed in goanimate.com’s forums:

Blogs based on Wordpress do not allow embedding videos. The code that
you pasted got trimmed when you saved your post. Only embedding from
certain sites (like YouTube) can work as a result on EduBlogs. We are
working on our side to contact Wordpress and see if there is a way to
enable that in the future, but for now nothing much we can do. We will
keep you posted if we find any way around this.

So, I faked it.  I took a screenshot of the opening frame, cropped it with Fireworks (similar to PhotoShop) and uploaded it to Edublogs as a picture.  I then made the picture link to the goanimate.com site.