Audio Appreciation

I will admit it. I am definitely a newcomer to the world of Audacity and utilizing audio clips in the classroom. I was excited for the opportunity to complete this assignment because it forced me to use Audacity and play with all of the features that I never had before. I always had good intentions of incorporating audio into various places within my lessons and classroom however, it just never came together.

Audacity was so simple to use that I would recommend it to anyone. I have never used any type of audio editing software and I was able to literally open the program, hit record, and begin. I was that easy. I then played around with the cutting and pasting features to customize my recordings. I knew that I wanted to make this project something that I could actually use in my classroom right now. So, I decided to change an upcoming assignment, that was a pencil and paper worksheet, into an interactive audio that students could listen to on the MP3 player in my classroom. This way they could actually do this assignment in a center while I work with other students in groups.

The last thing I did was add background music to the clip. My district subscribes to a royalty free music clip website called Soundzabound. It was very easy for me to download a music clip and add it to my audio in Audacity.

Animation Anguish

What a process! At first I was very scared of animation because I thought it would be very high tech and complicated with programming language. Then, I downloaded Alice and received a little bit of hope. Alice seemed to be user friendly by implementing drag and drop features instead of writing codes. As I watched the tutorials, I began thinking "Ok, I can do this! Animation doesn't seem to be that hard." Right after I told myself this, I accidentally moved a method to the wrong place in the tutorial and it got on to me telling me that I wasn't following directions carefully. This should have been my sign of things to come.

I began with a simple idea of creating a food chain because this is what we are studying in science right now in my class. I did enjoy the ability to easily drag actions into the world and constantly preview and tweak it. I did like how Alice provided the graphic animals for me to use in my world. Even though they did not have a huge variety of animals available, they had enough so that I could get the point across. I also like how they had numerous of actions for each object added to the world already programmed. I played with Alice for numerous hours and constructed my basic plot and animation actions. I became stuck with I tried to add my name into the final frame of the video. Once I added the words, they remained in the middle of my animation. Several hours later, I finally became so frustrated with the 3D text and camera angles that I decided to try a new animation software and see if I had any better luck.

I had played around with Kerpoof at school before so I decided to try out its' movie/animation feature. Kerpoof was also a drag and drop format. I was able to quickly insert characters and objects, add animation, create special effects, and add a final slide. I really liked how Kerpoof gave the option of adding music to different parts of the animation. I did find a few drawbacks to using Kerpoof. First, I did not like that I could not open all of their graphics to select the ones that I wanted to use. I had to continually click on the sidebar until a graphic that I could use appeared. Also, I didn't like that I cannot save the file to my computer as a movie to play back. The only was to share the file is by sending a link to the movie on the Kerpoof website.

Ultimately, I decided to go back to my almost finished Alice animation and try it again with a new day and a clear mind. By this time I had also received some great help from classmates on how to move the 3D text around in the world so that it is not right in the middle of my animation. It worked!!! YEA!!! I almost had a heart attack when my computer froze up when I was trying to save the world right after I got the text to work with me. I actually had Alice slow my computer down quite a bit when it was open and other programs were running. Last, I just had to tweak some of the timing to shorten the length and add some details to make it more interesting.

I learned a lot about animation through this process, like how to manipulate actions into what you want them to be, but I think that the most important thing I learned, was that animation is definitely not in my future.

50 Ways to Anchor Technology in your Classroom Tomorrow!

On top of all the other cool stuff at TCEA, there was one more addition to the schedule...me! I was lucky enough to have my proposal accepted to present a session today. A friend, also from Garland ISD, and I decided to compile a list of 50 easy ways to incorporate technology into your lessons and classroom. We both teach at non-Title 1 schools in average suburban neighborhoods, which means we really don't have a budget for technology. All of the technology currently in our classrooms has only been possible through writing grants. So needless to say, we have become pretty savvy at finding free resources to use with the students. Our list is made up of free websites to use as teaching and learning tools, free websites to use for management, Web 2.0 tools for projects, digital camera ideas, digital storytelling ideas, powerpoint tips, and Gogle tools for the classroom. 

We decided to pick some of our favorite websites to demonstrate for the audience, since there was no way we would be able to show them all. Here is a short summary of each of our favorites that we demonstrated:

Fur.ly- Use Fur.ly to enter in multiple URL addresses.  It will then convert the addresses into 1 short, simple URL.  This would be great for student projects, webquests, and more! We used it to present each of these websites. That way we could easily navigate back and forth through each of them.  http://fur.ly/f48/

Super Teacher Tools- Create seating charts, groups, and randomly pick names within seconds!  This site also has fantastic flash versions of Jeopardy and Millionaire games. To maximize your use of this tool, take a couple minutes to create a class list that will be saved. They will e-mail you the number and then each time you access a feature of the site you just have to enter your number for all students to reappear. 

Dove Whisper- This site contains Internet games for all elementary grades and subjects. Use Dove Whisper as a computer center in your classroom or add these links to your class website for students to practice skills.  

Build Your Wild Self- Have students create their "Wild Self".  Use their creations for an intro into animal adaptations and habitats in science, or use them as a creative writing prompt. I love using these as avatars for our class blog.

My Avatar Editor- Have students create a mii.  Use their avatars in various ways, such as decorations, "all about me" assignments, and goal setting and tracking. This site is great because it gives you the ability to save as a jpeg or png file. 

MyStudiyo- Create multimedia quizzes in minutes!  You can attach them to your blog or class website.

Tools for Educators - Create custom game boards, customized dice, and many other printables to use in a variety of lessons.

Rubistar-  Create a rubric quickly with this site.  Also, you can browse and edit pre-made rubrics.

Last, I want to share our presentation website. It has ALL of the 50 ideas hyperlinked, as well as a pdf that you can print out if you would like. Check it out here: https://sites.google.com/site/anchortechnologytomorrow/

Let me know what you think! And if you really like it, share it!!! Our hope is to continue adding to our list as we encounter new and interesting sites or ideas. 

TCEA Begins...

I am currently in Austin at the TCEA conference and I have already learned so much! This conference is one that I look forward to every year because the energy level and excitement from everyone here is through the roof. This year is the 30th annual convention and exposition for TCEA and they pulled out all the stops. Along with the hundreds of free sessions, they are offering interactive model classsrooms, Web 2.0 lounges, iPlaygrounds for gaming and Second Life, and bring your own laptop sessions. TCEA also hosted an exhibit hall with over 900 booths that offered hands on demonstrations. It was so big, it covered the size of FOUR football fields!!! This was one of my favorite places at the conference because I was able to get my hands on all of the latest technologies for the classroom and play with them right there! I attempted to capture just how big the exhibit hall was with the video on my iPhone. (There is LOTS of noise/screaming because numerous companies have drawings and give-aways all day long)



TCEA also had several speakers throughout the week. They opened by having Christopher Gardner give the keynote speech. Sound familiar? He is the inspiration behind the movie 'The Pursuit of Happyness"! He was able to convey his dedication to conquering life's obstacles in a motivational and inspiring speech.

This is truly the geeky tech-lovers dream. I plan on sharing all of the information that I have received, as I have done with the Voki, however it is so much that I need to organize it all first. I will be getting back with you soon!!!

Voki Fun!

Today I learned all about Voki. I actually first heard about this about a year ago but never had the chance to play with it. It is a website where you/students can customize an avatar, record their own audio, and have the avatar look like it is the one saying it all for FREE. I had lots of fun playing around with all the different options that this site gives you. One big benefit of this site is that students can publish their work on the internet without having to use actual videos and pictures of themselves. I did a little demo that you can watch below:


Get a Voki now!

Lesson Accelerators

Any time that I encounter new technology or ideas I try to figure out how it would fit into my classroom and teaching. The search options within Atomic Learning made it very easy for me to narrow down their list to the projects that I could apply in my classroom. I was able to select the grade range that I teach and only chose the applications that I have access to at school. Don't you hate when you learn about some awesome, new technology or lesson and then realize that you could only do it if you had a specific software that you do not own? So to shield myself from that disappointment I chose two projects that I knew I could implement easily.

Internet Safety: Be Aware!

This lesson would be the perfect project to use at the beginning of the school year. It combines teaching the basics of internet safety with the basics of using Word. The students create a 'Be Aware' poster to publicize internet safety. In this lesson they learn to create text boxes, insert graphics, edit and crop graphics, and much more basic functions of a Word document. I currently teach with numerous older teachers that are very apprehensive with technology. I am sure that all of these teachers are able to use Word for basic typing however are unfamiliar to do some of the other functions shown in this project. I believe that they would benefit by just watching the tutorials. I think that this is a great project that could be modified for every subject level. In reading, you could teach character analysis by having the students create posters of characters from novels. In math, you could teach fact families and have students create a poster of the fact family in their house. I can think of numerous ways to use this project science and social studies. 

A Frog's Life: Sequence It!

This lesson could not be more perfect for my class right now! We have been studying amphibians in science and I would love to have them complete the stages in a PowerPoint presentation. I am going to pull up these lessons for my students on Monday. The project covers the basics of using PowerPoint and how to insert graphics, text, and background colors. I think that my staff and students could both benefit from the tutorials given in this project. I would probably modify this project to include slide transitions and possibly audio files or hyperlinks added to each slide. Also the teacher overview gave an idea of extending this project by putting the slides out of order and having the students sequence them. This would be a great project for sequencing a story in reading or exploring cycles in science.