Tech Salad

Today I was back at GES, reading with Ms. Cachina’s class and working on videos with Ms. Webb’s class.

Here’s the sample video the kids helped produce.

Starting tomorrow, the students will be producing their own videos discussing different types of weather.

Look out, Ken Burns. Here comes the next generation of documentary producers.

I am spending the day at GES, reading with second grade students. We are expanding our fluency pilot started earlier this year at Byrd Elementary School.

The students in Ms. Gooding’s class (blog) jumped right in and recorded themselves reading books about the weather, snowmen, and dogs. We had a great time.

Yesterday afternoon I led a class on creating and sharing videos in class. We made videos in Photobooth and edited them in iMovie. We also looked at the screen capturing feature in QuickTime. It was a fun way to end my day.

Here are some resources I wanted to share with the teachers who attended the class, and with anyone else who reads my blog.

First, we have our iMovie tutorial. It is not new, but the basics are still the basics. We hope to update this over the summer.

Second, find out how you can have some fun with Photo Booth and green screen technology. There are so many possibilities for student projects using just this one simple app…

Third, if you are unsure of how to share your videos on your blog, you can always check out our publishing guide. There is a video tutorial for every step of the way.

What does your online presence say about you? When was the last time you Googled yourself?

I had not Googled myself in a few months. And, the last few times, I had not looked past the first two pages of results. This weekend I had time, and I found some interesting things.

First, when I reset my AIM password a few  months ago, I somehow activated a setting that posts all my iChat status updates to the AOL Lifestream. There was an incredibly long and boring list of “in my office” and “teaching” and “away” that didn’t do anybody any harm. Still, I did not want that visible to the whole world and have deactivated it.

Second, I realized my email to NPR’s Morning Edition made it into the Ombudsman’s blog. Pretty cool. I wish they’d notified me. Or maybe they did and the message went unnoticed and directly to junk. I’m glad they read their email, in any case.

If you do not Google yourself up regularly, you should. Scan the first few pages of results, and make sure the links provided portray you in the fashion you would like to be perceived. It is not narcissism, but a necessary action for all of us of living online.

Today the students in Mrs. Yearout-Patton’s class are reading selections from the Civil Rights Voting Act of 1965.

Well, legislators are not known for the readability of their prose. Reading Article X of Section Y of any law can be a daunting task for most of us, so just imagine a high school student afflicted with a terrible case of Senioritis struggling with the unfamiliar terms and convoluted sentences.

To help the students get the most of the reading, Mrs. Yearout-Patton will be showing the students how to activate the voiceover feature on the iPads. Listening to the read-aloud and reading along with it is a great way to improve comprehension of tough passages. And, accessing the legislature as a PDF using iBooks gives students the additional advantage of finding unfamiliar words in  the built-in dictionary with the tap of a finger.

If you would like to know more about Mrs. Yearout-Patton’s classroom and her excellent use of technology, visit her blog and follow her on Twitter (@GotGovt)

This morning I was invited to Ms. Townsend’s ESOL classroom (blog). The students have been using Google Translate and other tools on mobile devices to help them communicate with teachers and peers, and I wanted to see how things were going.

The students have benefitted greatly and have learned much since they started using the iPods, and we wanted to give them even more opportunities than the apps can.

After chatting with the two students from Mexico, the three of us agreed some of the apps are aimed at very young children. They want something more. We have found several podcasts we liked after reviewing a few episodes together. One in particular caught our attention. Habla bien ingles (iTunes link) helps Spanish speakers master sounds in English. With video and audio, each episode guides students through various sounds a letter might make in different words.

The students now have the podcast episodes on their iPods. They also know how to use the video camera to record themselves practicing the sounds after watching each episode. Video of themselves will allow them to self-asses and practice any time.

Next week we will get together again and see how everyone is doing, and we will load the next set of podcast episodes from the Tu ingles! podcast (iTunes link).

I know I told Mrs. Rohrer I’d send her these for her blog, but that does not mean I can’t post them to mine, too. I love them, and I can’t wait to see the final watercolors on paper.

Everyone catches up on their reading over the break, right? Here’s something interesting I found at OpenCulture: a video of a TV game show where contestants have to do some interesting math.

This made me think of one of my favorite apps we’ve installed on our iPads here in Goochland. Contig (iTunes link) is a game where the player has to combine the numbers to arrive at an answer, then quickly find the answer on a grid full of numbers. The numbers are never as high as those in the video, but the player has to be quick to find the number on the grid. It is a great way to get kids doing math in a fun way.

This week I spent a morning with Mrs. Rohrer’s students working on their watercolor project. We used the iPad cameras to photograph the students’ drawings. Then, we brought them into SketchBook Express and added color, simulating watercolor painting. The finished painting will be a model for students to follow after the break when we do the real watercolor painting on paper.

When I was finalizing my presentations for VSTE a couple of weeks ago, John Hendron (blog) said, “If you were more adventurous, you’d enable WebDAV and use that instead of DropBox to share your documents.” I don’t like taking risks at conferences, so I just nodded my head and went about my day.

Last week I remembered the conversation and decided to look into it. My Google search returned two tutorials. One assumed I knew more than I did. The other one was detailed enough for me, so off I went into Terminal, facing my fear of anything starting with “sudo.”

Of course, it did not work. So, if you follow the tutorial, just know you have to add “<Directory” to the beginning of the third bit of STEP 3. In the image below, you see there is a </Directory> at the end, but there is no <Directory at the beginning. Computers don’t seem to like that much.

That seemed to do the trick, and we moved several Pages documents back and forth between my iPad and my MacBook. Beautiful.

One more thing, I did not name the user “myipad” but “student” instead.

What am I doing with my WebDAV now? Students can connect to my laptop and turn in their iWork files from their iPads. Now that I know it works so beautifully, we’ll be following the tutorial, minus the hour spent on debugging, and get all teachers collecting and sharing documents with student iPads. One step closer to making this seamless.