Today I missed my Windows PC.  Yes, yes I know ….. but before you mac’ers shoot me with bows and arrows, hear me out.

Over the past few weeks my 5th graders have been creating Lines, Angles and Polygon digital learning stories for 3rd & 4th graders at our school.  The purpose was to create an introduction digital story using photos taken around our very own school environment showing just how math exists in the “real world”, and teaching our younger students a few introductory things about Geometry.

Now we are a mac elementary school and I am a mac user at home (but have recently come from eight years in PC schools).  Last year I did a similar project with my Year 7 students but used Photostory3.  This year I made the project a little simpler for Grade 5 (Year 6) but used iMovie since there is no Photostory3 equivalent for the mac.

iMovie is a great programme, but it’s not as simple to use (with students) as Photostory3.  I am however very proud of the work that my students did with their digital learning stories as we finished them off today (just in time to be watched by 3rd & 4th graders before Christmas break).

Today we accomplished the following things:

1. Recorded our voices (after preparing a script) into our digital learning stories in iMovie
2. Created our own background music in Garageband
3. Added titles, credits and words to our digital learning stories

Thank goodness our fabulous 21st Century Digital Learning Specialist, (and my very good friend) Ms Cofino was with us in class today.  She spent three hours with us as we finished off this project.  Her help was invaluable as she most definitely knows more about iMovie & Garageband than I do!

I know you’re all busy thinking why on earth would you do ALL that at once???  And I must say that wasn’t the plan at all!  We have an issue with the available space for each student on our server.  Their flash drives are not big enough to store an iMovie project (and you know how BIG those are when you’re working on them!!) Plus our laptops are set up to clear everything on the laptop when the students log-off or shut down (which is a good thing really).  We didn’t really have a choice but to get our projects completely finished and rendered before we had to let another class use the laptop carts.

Reflection?
I love this project based learning.  I learnt a lot about the way my students work together, and already have some particular skills to pinpoint and polish next semester regarding collaboration.

I need an alternative hard drive so that my students aren’t forced to finish their work in a hurry.

I really need to make sure that I am using the right tool for the job.  Was iMovie really the right tool for this job?  Could VoiceThread have done the same thing?  (That would eliminate the server/saving problem).  And will I do it again?  Of course I will, and I’ll be tweaking it a bit more next time too.

PS:  In the next few days, we’ll be embedding our digital learning stories for Lines, Angles and Polygons on our class wiki math page – so take a look if you have some time.   We’d love some feedback on the discussion tab if you have time too.

Cross-posted at To Argentina and Beyond

When you teach in Thailand, you are required by Thai Law to complete a Thai Teaching Certificate. We are completing modules every 5-6 weeks and this week’s module was about Thai Culture through Art, Dance, Music and Drama. Part of the module included a wonderful performance by the Joe Louie Puppet Theatre. This was a truely enjoyable performance. I would highly recommend you go see the Joe Louie Puppet Theatre if you are visiting Bangkok.

The following slide shows don’t really do the performance the justice it deserves. However, I was pleased to see how well the shadows came out in the photographs I took (considering all the trouble I’ve been having with my camera lately).

If you want to hear the music that accompanies each slide show please click on the speaker in the top left hand corner.

Note:  I had so much trouble trying to embed the slide show in edublogs that I decided to just link the images to my travel blog where the slide shows were much easier to embed.

The first slideshow is photos documenting the meeting the puppets and learning about how they move and how gestures without words are made.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Slideshow #2 is the actual story of how Hanuman, the very cheeky monkey god wins the love of the very beautiful mermaid Supamatcha. Together they have a son who resembles his father but also has the tail of his mother.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Sideshow #3 is the same story but captured in the shadows.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Just in my inbox ……from the fabulous team at Breathe Technology (whom I miss very much!!)

“Becta is encouraged by the support it has had from the industry for the project to develop an interactive whiteboard file format that will meet the needs of teachers, lecturers and tutors. We have been spurred on in this work by the level of interest of user representatives in England and internationally.”

Becta has received commitments to adopt the common file format from the following providers of interactive whiteboard technologies:

• eInstruction (Interwrite Learning)
• Hitachi
• Luidia
• Mimio
• RM
• Sahara Presentation Systems
• Smart Technologies
• TeamBoard

Steve Lucey added: “We are keen to do what we can to ensure all providers understand the benefits this specification has to its users. We therefore intend to work towards adoption of the specification by other providers and continue to encourage their involvement in the project.”

Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous!  I have a wealth of IWB resources that I’ve developed over the past 4 years using the Interwrite Interactive Whiteboard (eInstruction).  Now I’m working in a school that uses SmartBoards (Smart Technologies) – so all my Interwrite files were rendered useless to learning in our classroom.

Can you see why I’m thrilled with this company’s incredible initiative and vision?

Go Becta – You ROCK!

Every week, without fail, something gets delivered to my inbox.  It’s like receiving presents at Christmas – but it’s weekly!

This week one of the diigo groups I belong to,  Interactive Whiteboards in Classroom, had a bookmark link shared to Shambles in S.E Asia.  I was lucky enough to meet Mr Chris Smith in person during the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai earlier this year.  Sam the Kiwi (our class mascot) proudly wears his my life’s become shambles badge every day.  What better reason to go take a look?

Here’s what I stumbled upon:  Imagination Cubed.  A nifty little flash program that automatically animates drawing.   It offers drawing tools, shapes, stamper, type and line.  It speeds up your animation automatically – so it replays smoothly.

You then email the link to yourself or you can send the link to others, so the email address used has to be real.  It would be better still if you could chose from an embed code.

Here’s the link to my little off-the-top-of-my-head thinking about how to use Imagination Cubed in math – created in 4 minutes.

Click this link to see a drawing come to life at Imagination Cubed

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

My immediate thought for use?  Students could make each other demos of their problem solving thinking.

Any other ideas on how you could use this tool?

After having this pop up twice in my google reader first by Crucial Thought (Chris Craft) and then by Langwitches (Silvia Tolisano), I couldn’t resist ……………

You can only make rain using 1/60 sec.

(Courtesy of Understanding Shutter Speed by Bryan Peterson)

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