| Digital - teacher | Education in a technological world

Visual Literacy - Pt2

At the moment these videos are freezing after 1 second. I'm looking into why. I might to reload them onto to the web to sort it out. Fixed.

Update on the stop motion software I mentioned in the last post. I "accidently" discovered a setting tucked away in Moviemaker that allows the frame duration to be cut drastically - and that means that it can be used for stop motion photos. Here's a quick test of it using a lego horse in the classroom;

 

And another piece of FREE software that I am going to mention will be Moviestorm. Select characters, settings, point and click on what they should do (move / walk / look at / etc). It also allows you to record audio and use it as a conversation within the movie you create. Here's the example I'll use with the staff (note there is no audio on it yet - got to record a child speaking!);

 

Visual Literacy

I'm leading a staff meeting soon on ways to improve literacy without producing pages and pages of writing. I'm going to be looking at two - possibly three - ways of achieving this.

(1) Comic Life - once upon a time  available only for the mac - is a simple way to take photos and add graphic comments / speech. For the boys this is something that they'll take to. Here's a short comic about a literacy task on writing instructions...

(2) Moviemaker story telling using photos / audio / transitions and titles. Using the "add title on the selected clip" and selecting a "video inset with news banner title" a short sentence can be added to each image that appears. Increasing the time an image stays on screen means two/three sentences can be shown. Take a look at the example I quickly made below;

(3) There is also stop motion animation - although I'm struggling to find a simple looking program. If worst comes to it, I'll have to use QuickTime Pro to show a sequence of photos made using lego (that favourite for stop motion movies!!)

K.I.S.S.

The motto for anyone trying something new. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS).

Well, audio is a perfect example of this. For example -  you want to get the children to record themselves talking about a topic they've been working on?
Well, take a voice recorder, record the conversation, hook up the voice recorder to the computer, attempt to copy the sound across to the computer, save it, forget what it was called, have to search for it, copy it into audacity, save it again and convert it into an mp3, post it onto the website, change the coding so that it will appear embedded instead of as a download (phew)

OR....

try Vocoroo - visit the website, hit record, speak into your microphone. Stop, copy the code, post and hey presto it's done.

So simple. Brilliant.

iPhone, Apps and non-apps

So, I'm getting used to the new phone now. I'm starting to wonder how I got on without it - it reads my email, sends mail, lets me check up on my twitterings, catch up on TV through iPlayer, view the school website, post to it on the go, check on posted comments and approve them and more!

I've also been looking through the iPhone app store - some great things in there such as the ocarina - simply blow into the microphone and touch the four circles on the touchscreen to make various notes and tunes.

What I can't find though is the new google mobile app with voice recognition. I read all about it last week, watched the video that google posted online showing how it works, and checked out the apps store but no sign. It's disappeared from view completely.

I guess this is evidence of why google should never advertise something before they know it has been published by another company!

Taken for granted

Sometimes it takes the most basic task to make you realise that what you know is not always the same as what everyone else knows.
Take loading an image into a program (like word / powerpoint / etc). I was showing another member of staff where I had loaded some images to use within a lesson and telling them what the pupils should do. I clicked on the little icon that lets you change the folder display to show thumbnails, and was asked "Wow - what did you do?"

I showed it again, and realised that this was a new idea for the member of staff. It seemed like such a simple thing to do, yet has had a great impact on another member of staff.

Still waiting

The Typepad blogging platform has a new post on their "Everything Typepad" blog about new features that they have released. However, there is also this paragraph at the end of the post....

There is a small group of you whose blogs are still in the process of being migrated to the new platform (we want to make sure we make the transition as smooth as possible for you) but we should be on track, as Ben predicted, to have everyone on the new platform by the end of the year.

Guess who is in that "small" group that is still waiting. Yep - you guessed it right. I am!! I'll be the last to be upgraded, at 11.59 on December 31st. Just you wait and see.

iPhone email no-no

So, the iPhone is now set up and working. I can now...

• call,
• receive calls,
• get onto the web through my home wi-fi, 3G connection and the school wi-fi network (bit of proxy fiddling needed to get sorted!)
• Receive email

but I cannot send mail from my 1and1 accounts.

That was a bit of a downer. So lots of fiddling with server settings, smtp values and SSL details later and it was still not sending mail. Until, that is, I disabled all the smtp values, apart from my googlemail account, and routed all mail through google.

Now everything is working properly. Hurrah!!

The End of an Era

I was sat playing with my new iphone, with the news on in the background, when suddenly a news item grabbed my full attention.

Alton Towers is to retire and dismantle the Corkscrew after today. This was the first ever roller coaster I went on. It was back in the 80's, the ride was new, and I was on a school trip (when school trips were for fun!!) No other ride lifted you and twisted you in its famous double corkscrew as this ride did.

When I think that the other attractions at the time were "Doom and Sons", a log flume, the Enterprise and other un-memorable rides the corkscrew was THE attraction to ride on.

Farewell Corkscrew - you were a blast.

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• The Corkscrew, a main attraction at Alton Towers, is to close

Happy Blogging Birthday

November 4th, 2003. Important date that.

I was starting out as the Digital Teacher in Residence for a Digital Literacy project at Nottingham Trent University and made my very first blog posting.  Five years later and I'm still posting in the very same blog, as well as using several others!

• Digital Teacher -
  my main blog posting my thoughts

• simon-widdowson.com -
  built as a website for my projects

• Porchester Junior School Main Site -
  built for the school I work at

• Porchester Junior School | Pupil Area

• Porchester Junior School | Staff Area -
  secure area for staff resources

• DragonsCavern -
  built to report news about my hobby

• Bectan Sands -
  an online literacy project for children

Not only that, but I've set up other sites using Typepad blogs too;

• charliecat.co.uk -
  built for a cat!

• A Road Well Travelled -
  a one year, diary style, story

• Porchester Junior School - Tanzania Section -
  visit to a partner school in Africa

• Porchester Junior School - Centenary Section -
  celebrating 100 years

Merging Mippin

I've been using Mippin for a while now - and I have to say that nothing takes my RSS feeds and puts them onto a mobile device quicker or easier.
The school website has one mippin feed at the moment - to display the main articles - but we have lots of  other content that I would really like to get onto mobile devices as more parents now have the facility to view the website this way.
I want to put the podcast, vodcast and pupil website feeds into mippin too, so I asked whether it was possible to merge feeds. It is! Mippins reply came as follows...

In terms of your question about mergeing feeds, it is possible for you to create a Porchester Persona (part of our new social functionality) and give this Persona favourites of all your Porchester sites.  So what you do is go to Mippin and logout of your current session.  Then Signin and Signup with a new name of Porchester, then go to each of your sites and click Pin to your homepage.  Then logout.  The new url you would tell the parent is then http://porchester.mippin.com .  Please encourage the parent to Follow Porchester so that they can all see each other - if porchester follows back you will be able to send messages on a 1:1 basis

I've tried it this evening and, minus a few bugs that I have mailed mippin about it does seem to work. We can now offer website audio, video and articles through mobile devices. Super!!

Woices - Sitepal - Audacity: Story!

I took some text from word, dropped it into Sitepal, and recorded the results in Audacity, then saved as an mp3 and uploaded to woices, tagged the audio to a location and so began a story. Wonder if I can be creative enough to complete this...

Router for the neighbourhood

I came across this article from a colleague I worked with during my Digital-Teacher residency all about leaving your router on 24/7.
It makes interesting reading, especially the comment about using a BT router as one of their hotspots to improve their public wireless reach.

Now this has got me thinking of what to do with the wireless school network during evenings / weekends / holidays. Could it be possible to open this connection up to the community (whilst keeping access to the school servers locked out) and launch a new revenue stream? Something that I am going to look into more carefully when I return to school.