Finds 101008

Sites I have recently tagged in my delicious account:

• Spelling City: Teachers can create custom spelling lists, then the kids can play games like hangmouse and a lot of others to learn the words. Some of our 4th grade teachers are already using this and recommend it.
• TestToob: all science videos are approved by the site owners prior to publishing, ensuring content remains 100% school safe. Appropriate for middle through high school. There is a video contest ($150 in prizes) with five categories.
• Minuetmixer: comes from the wonderful New York Philharmonic Game Room. Students can create and play their own minuets. The url for their compositions can be emailed and posted on a blog or online journal.
• Picasa 3: This is what I use to catalog my digital photographs and images. This is a new version with additional features to retouch your images, create and edit movies, capture your screen, add text or watermarks, etc.
• Soshiku tries to differentiate itself by offering to track and manage assignments and homework for students. It keeps track of when your assignments are due and can even notify you via email or SMS. It has an elegant and easy to understand user interface with added features like saving notes and attaching files with each assignment. Easy tracking of school projects and homework assignments Save notes, manage tasks and attach files with each assignment Get notified via email and SMS about due dates Share messages and chat with friends Free
• Certificate Creator: Create and print awards and certificates for school, sports, work or fun!
• Teacher Tools: Forms and Letters
• Jog the Web: similar to TrackStart, take your visitors on a tour of websites with a narrow pane across the bottom to view comments about each site

Mathematical Thinkers

My daughter brought home a “foldable” filled with notes on mathematical thinkers, perfect content for a Photostory slideshow. I put her to work, assisting me in preparing for my first Digital Storytelling workshop.

Download Mathematical Thinkers

We found Photostory, free software from Microsoft, very easy to use. The program leads you through the steps of creating a digital story. Recording a separate audio file for each slide worked great. Customizing the motion and adding text was easy. The provided music options are a great time saver for those not wanting to find and import music. If you can’t find any tunes to your liking, you can import you own music. The trickest part was creating title and credits slides, since the program doesn’t provide options for creating such a slide. We used PowerPoint to create a credit slide, saving it as a jpg. We then imported this jpg into Photostory, just like we did all the other images.

We uploaded the production to Archive.org, because it is free and not blocked by the school’s filter. Then I used the Embed Media button in Edublogs to embed the production in this blog post. If you intend to embed the production in a blog post, be sure to click the Settings button during the Save Your Story step of Photostory, and choose “Profile for computer -1 (320×240).” The default setting is too large.

tag: edtech, k12, Photostory, PowerPoint, Digital Storytelling, Archive.org, math

Dallas World Aquarium

During Spring Break, my family traveled to Dallas, Texas to visit my husband’s sister and her family. We enjoyed touring the city’s World Aquarium. My daughter’s “assignment” was to select one animal from the aquarium to bring home to Missouri. She had to choose an animal based on its ability to survive in our habitat, as opposed to one she liked. No, the animals aren’t available for checkout. I was just once again using her as a guinea pig while preparing for my first digital storytelling workshop. Another part of her inquiry lesson was to collect video footage and provide narration. Below is our first digital story. Click the big triangle play button to stream the  video, or right-click on the Download link and choose “Save target as” or “Save link as” to download the video.

Download World Aquarium

The technicalities: Using Windows Movie Maker, we captured and cut the video. Then imported some images from our digital camera, and a few downloaded public domain images. After recording the narration, I added in some creative commons licensed music. The title and transition features polished off the project. Then I saved the project as “video for broadband (340 kbps)” in a Windows Media Video (wmv) format. I uploaded the wmv file to archive.org, where it was automatically converted into other formats and various file sizes (flash, mpeg4). I chose archive.org because it is free, and not blocked by our District’s filter. The flash version was the fastest to load, but too blocky for my daughter’s standards. The wmv file is the best quality, but a large file (better to download and not stream). It is the one I used for this blog post. But I’m guessing since this is a wmv file, it won’t play on all computers. Next we will publish a Voicethread version, and a then Photostory version. Please leave your recommendations, comments, or suggestions.

tag: edtech k12 Dallas World Aquarium digital storytelling Windows Movie Maker Creative Commons