On Safe Share: The Actual '73 Giving Tree Movie Spoken By Shel Silverstein
Thursday, November 21, 2013
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On Safe Share: The Actual '73 Giving Tree Movie Spoken By Shel Silverstein
Friday, March 15, 2013
Avatars
There are almost as many ways to create free avatars as there are reasons to do so. Students love creating digitized versions of themselves for online communications and websites, including social networking sites like Edmodo, and digital storytelling sites like VoiceThread. In addition to encouraging creativity and technology skills, the use of customized avatars helps protect student privacy. Instead of posing recognizable photos of themselves, students can use photo editing sites to modify their pictures in a variety of creative and artistic ways, or they can create a digitized avatar that resembles an Anime character, a Lego person, or a range of other themes. Here are a few of my favorite choices for creating avatars:
With Voki,students can create customized avatars that speak. Voki allows you to record your own voice, or type text that will be converted to speech in a choice of more than 25 languages and accents. There are a variety of features for customizing the look of Voki avatars and backgrounds. Voki is free, and easy to use; I created my Voki in less than 5 minutes. Click the play button to hear my Voki talk!
Picture yourself in plastic with the Lego Mini-Mizer.
Just like with real Legos, you can choose from a variety of heads, hair, hats, torsos, arms, legs and accessories. I couldn't resist giving myself a cape and a mini iPad to hold.
PicassoHead provides features made famous by Picasso that you can use for creating an avatar that Picasso himself might approve. This would be an interesting tool for students to use in art class while learning about the work of the artist and exploring their own creativity. Once you create your own avatar, you can save it to the gallery, and browse to the other creations.
Clay Yourself: Students would enjoy exploring the possibilities of claymation with this interactive tool sponsored by Hotels.com. The interface is engaging and easy to use. The site also includes a "stage name" generator and a script generator tool, so that users can create a brief script that includes fill-in-the-blank words (similar to Mad Libs) and then use the built-in audio feature to record the script for their clay character.
Free Photo Editing Sites provide other alternatives for students to create avatars, based on photos of themselves. Two websites that I like are FotoFlexer and BeFunky. I used FotoFlexer to 'cartoonize' my picture on this blog (under About Me). In collaboration with art teacher extraordinaire Eileen Barnett at Blanchard Memorial School, our 6th-grade students had a great time adding artistic effects and other gadgets to their photos with BeFunky. They printed their "funkified" portraits for a weaving project in art class, and saved a 'funky' avatar to upload to their VoiceThread account. My avatar here was created on BeFunky by appying the Pointillism effect, and adding one of the selection of frames.
There are almost as many ways to create free avatars as there are reasons to do so. Students love creating digitized versions of themselves for online communications and websites, including social networking sites like Edmodo, and digital storytelling sites like VoiceThread. In addition to encouraging creativity and technology skills, the use of customized avatars helps protect student privacy. Instead of posing recognizable photos of themselves, students can use photo editing sites to modify their pictures in a variety of creative and artistic ways, or they can create a digitized avatar that resembles an Anime character, a Lego person, or a range of other themes. Here are a few of my favorite choices for creating avatars:
With Voki,students can create customized avatars that speak. Voki allows you to record your own voice, or type text that will be converted to speech in a choice of more than 25 languages and accents. There are a variety of features for customizing the look of Voki avatars and backgrounds. Voki is free, and easy to use; I created my Voki in less than 5 minutes. Click the play button to hear my Voki talk!
Picture yourself in plastic with the Lego Mini-Mizer.
Just like with real Legos, you can choose from a variety of heads, hair, hats, torsos, arms, legs and accessories. I couldn't resist giving myself a cape and a mini iPad to hold.
PicassoHead provides features made famous by Picasso that you can use for creating an avatar that Picasso himself might approve. This would be an interesting tool for students to use in art class while learning about the work of the artist and exploring their own creativity. Once you create your own avatar, you can save it to the gallery, and browse to the other creations.
Clay Yourself: Students would enjoy exploring the possibilities of claymation with this interactive tool sponsored by Hotels.com. The interface is engaging and easy to use. The site also includes a "stage name" generator and a script generator tool, so that users can create a brief script that includes fill-in-the-blank words (similar to Mad Libs) and then use the built-in audio feature to record the script for their clay character.
Free Photo Editing Sites provide other alternatives for students to create avatars, based on photos of themselves. Two websites that I like are FotoFlexer and BeFunky. I used FotoFlexer to 'cartoonize' my picture on this blog (under About Me). In collaboration with art teacher extraordinaire Eileen Barnett at Blanchard Memorial School, our 6th-grade students had a great time adding artistic effects and other gadgets to their photos with BeFunky. They printed their "funkified" portraits for a weaving project in art class, and saved a 'funky' avatar to upload to their VoiceThread account. My avatar here was created on BeFunky by appying the Pointillism effect, and adding one of the selection of frames.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Digital Learning Day
Teachers and students at our school enthusiastically participated in the second annual Digital Learning Day, a nation-wide initiative to promote and celebrate the use of instructional technologies. We joined nearly 25,000 teachers and millions of students across the country in an effort to recognize successful digital learning practices. Digital learning is changing education in powerful ways, and the benefits are obvious: when given access to digital tools, our students exhibit higher levels of engagement and demonstrate the ability to access information, create, think critically and communicate globally. This collage represents just some of the digital learning happening at our school on February 6, 2013, which is not much different from the digital learning that happens here every day!
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Assessment Tools for 21st Century Teaching
Finding time and efficient ways to assess students is one challenge for classroom teachers that can be eased with technology. There are numerous online assessment tools and iPad apps specifically designed to help educators meet Common Core Standards, track student progress, facilitate grading, monitor student behavior, and generate reports. Many of them are available for a free trial period, or as free basic versions (typically with a cost for upgrading to premium levels).
Mastery Connectt is a promising assessment tool available both online, and as an iPad app. Once you register for the free version, you can specify the standards you choose to track, including Common Core and any state standards. The free version provides tools for creating assessments, and for collaborating with other teachers, either in your school or with any teachers in the Mastery Connect community. The formative assessments and mastery tracking tools are easy to use, and the video tutorials and sample assessments can help you quickly get started. The ability to track skill mastery based on specific standards is impressive, and will be more so as the library of assessments is built by contributions from other teachers. While you can search for assessment to upload, you may find that you need to create your own until the Mastery Connect community becomes more active. Watch this NutShell video for an overview of Mastery Connect:
Socrative is an excellent formative assessment tool that can be used with students on iPads or any Internet-connected device. After signing up for a free teacher account,teachers can create or import quizzes (either multiple choice or short answer). Socrative generates a "room number," which students enter from the student version of the Socrative website or app. Once the teacher starts a quiz, students are able to take the assessment, and teachers can instantly see and graphically display the results. Socrative accomplishes the same results as hand-held clicker devices, such as the SMART Senteos, in a much easier and more cost-effective way.
Quia is full-featured online assessment website that provides a variety of tools, including templates for creating 16 types of assessments, tools for creating and grading quizzes, and access to millions of previously created online activities. Quia charges a subscription fee, but you can try if for free for 30 days.
Class DoJo is online behavior management software that can also be downloaded as an iPad app. The software is designed to help teachers improve student conduct and engagement by recording specific behaviors and generating awards for good behavior. Students tend to be motivated by the fun interface and immediate feedback.
iWorksheet is a free iPad app that provides a very simple way to administer multiple choice assessments. Teachers can add easily add worksheets to the app by snapping a picture of a paper worksheet with the iPad camera. Once worksheets are added they can be saved for easy retrieval. At this point iWorksheet only supports multiple-choice assessments, but I expect that features will be expanded in the future.
Blubbr is in beta, so may not be quite ready for prime time, but it looks like it might be a very engaging classroom assessment tool. The website allows you to create and play trivia games based on YouTube clips. There are now over 150 existing video-based trivia games in Blubbr's Education category, covering subjects such as the solar system, American presidents, and how to write a good essay. You can check it out (and check your musical knowledge) by playing the Peter and the Wolf Quiz. I think the best feature of Blubbr is that you can create and share your own trivia games. This is an assessment tool that you and your students can have some fun with!
Mastery Connectt is a promising assessment tool available both online, and as an iPad app. Once you register for the free version, you can specify the standards you choose to track, including Common Core and any state standards. The free version provides tools for creating assessments, and for collaborating with other teachers, either in your school or with any teachers in the Mastery Connect community. The formative assessments and mastery tracking tools are easy to use, and the video tutorials and sample assessments can help you quickly get started. The ability to track skill mastery based on specific standards is impressive, and will be more so as the library of assessments is built by contributions from other teachers. While you can search for assessment to upload, you may find that you need to create your own until the Mastery Connect community becomes more active. Watch this NutShell video for an overview of Mastery Connect:
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