VoiceThread

http://voicethread.com/share/1169376/

Digital Storytelling

I composed a digital story of part of my trip to the UK during the summer of 2007 using Picasa. In late June and early July Olivia and I traveled to England and Scotland. I was so smitten by Scotland, particularly the city of Edinburgh, that I chose it as the subject of my story. (It must be those Scottish roots in my mother's family - they came over from Scotland in the late 1700s.) Scotland really felt like "home", like I could just pick up and leave the US and live there "happily ever after".

In retrospect, there are many aspects of the trip that I could make into digital stories. For instance, when we were in London, Tony Blair was resigning as PM and Gordon Brown was taking over the office. (Almost three years later Brown has himself resigned.) We were at Buckingham Palace watching the changing of the guard and Blair and Brown's arrival to meet with the Queen was imminent. Press helicopters were flying overhead to catch sight of Blair and Brown's motorcades to the palace. The same day we were at Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey and there were protests going on against Brown and the Iraq war. I have never been that close to an actual political protest and it was exciting (for a long-time rabble-rouser myself) - history being played out before our very eyes! What a great story that would make if only I were a history teacher (alas).

There were so many wonderful castles and gardens that we visited, I could easily compose several digital stories on those alone. Would that not be great if only I were teaching botany or landscape design! Well, maybe I'll get the opportunity to compose such a story someday for fellow master gardeners.

All in all, Picasa was relatively easy to use. One can choose to insert text captions or voice to accompany photos. I kept my digital story to about 25 or 27 photos although I had many more photos I could have added. Unfortunately, I did not find a way to add music to my story. Perhaps this is not an option in Picasa, with my digital story being more like a web album. I was really hoping to add some bagpipe and Celtic music to accompany my story. So, if any of you out there have any pointers...

Other"Tools" Assignment

Okay, it's the end of the school year and the kids must be rubbing off on me because instead of exploring three of the Other Tools in the assignment, I went to three categories of tools and explored three of each of those, so bear with me while I cover what I've learned.

First, I investigated the "Quizzes and Polls (Surveys) tools" because Mary and I used clickers a few times in the biology classroom this year as well as taking online quizzes and surveys in the library. I visited "eQuizzes" which I registered for. It's a free web-based quizzing program where you can create custom quizzes and monitor student scores. They had a few sample quizzes on there about snow, the presidents, elemental symbols, and US state capitals. (It's always fun to take the sample quizzes to find out if you're really smarter than a 5th-grader!) Then it was on to "Yacapaca" where you can type in your country selector and they will give you sample quizzes from your country on a variety of subjects. There are file quizzes, but you can create your own quizzes with "Yacapaca". They allow you to choose items from quizzes to share with students online, but it seemed like I had to wait a long time for each question to load. That might be a disadvantage for the impatient student. I also went to "ClassMarker" where quizzes and tests can be used in class or can be embedded into a website. There were free and paid accounts available for this tool.

Next, it was onto the "Presentation/Publishing/Multimedia tools" where I went to "Glogster". I've been curious about "Glogster" since Emily had it on our original assignment list, then removed it. Anyway, with "Glogster" you can use text, images, video, and music to make a "poster" of yourself and link the poster to Facebook, etc. "Glogster" is marketed as the "perfect way to express yourself". "Scrapblog" is an online scrapbook where photos can be published online or in print in order to archive special occasions and events. On "Scrapblog" you choose a project and design then add photos and finishing touches. "MyPhotoAlbum" you can create online photo albums by using your own photos and images from the web. Photo and video storage is available and there are private and public settings for sharing photos and videos.

I also looked at a few "Image and Photography tools". "Flickr" is a site where you can share photos and videos. There are free "basic" accounts are available and the site includes a photo management tool. Using "Picasa" you can import pictures from your camera and make video and photo slide shows. I am going to use this site for my Digital Storytelling assignment since it's a free download from Google. Finally, I visited "SaysIt" where you can create funny photos and graphics like signs (think the funny church signs), seals, badges, et cetera.

Wordle

I love Wordle! It is a way to be creative for us non-arsty folk. I can see using Wordle for projects after reading a novel or short story in English, for example, using Wordle to critique the work, list the characters, give a plot summary, et cetera. Wordle could be used for an art project since font color, size, and style can be changed (also tagul.com and tagxedo.com would be great with this type of assignment). It can be used in the beginning of the school year for the students to introduce themselves to their teacher - tell who you are using Wordle, for instance. Wordle can be used for holidays or to commemorate special occasions (birthdays, first communions, et cetera) - it is the lazy-man's scrapbooking tool! I would use Wordle for the cover sheet/title page in my students' binders or for them to tell what they have learned in a course over the past school year. It would be a fun way for them to really think about all of the things they learned and perhaps submit it as a final assignment for the year. They could use the opportunity to be creative and inject their personality into it.

The two Wordles I did as part of the assignemnt were a portion of Martin Luther King's 1963 "I have a Dream" speech. I found a text of the speech and copied and pasted the "I have a dream..." portion of the speech into Wordle. After some minor glitches with Java, it finally worked. I submitted this Wordle to the public folder on the Wordle site. I also used terms from my Astronomy class to compose another Wordle. I plan on posting both of them in my classroom. The kids will probably ask what they are and I can share Wordle with them. Wordle was a really interesting and exciting discovery for me!

Diigo

I found Diigo to be quite interesting, a different take on the Wiki and other tools with collaborative potential. It was also fairly easy to use. I believe this tool would be useful for groups to share information that cannot be summmarized easily. In other words, one must go to the source/article to get all the information. This tool would be useful for students working in a group on a research project as well. They could pool their resources using Diigo and pick from the best to use in their project. Or, alternatively, they could assign each group member a part of the project to research and all members of the group could see what the others have collected. Members could also check up on who is the weakest member of the group (who has not done their share of research or whose work is lacking in quality). Teachers and instructors could join the group to keep tabs on student progress.

During the summer I work at the Greater Cincinnati Civic Garden Center as a volunteer on the Horticulture Helpline. We often get numerous calls for help on the same subject/topic, so something like Diigo would be a great way to electronically pool the resources we find on the web on a particular topic (end rot in tomatoes, for example) to share with one another and with our clients as well.

Wikis

Okay, at this point I am starting to feel overwhelmed by the number of technology-driven tools out there. I didn't feel that way until I delved into the Wikis assignment, however. I watched the instructional video (edit-write-save; new page-link) and read the overview of Wikis suggested in the assignment (simple, joint, and fully-collaborative web publishing). Then I clicked on the "Classroom Wikis to Check Out" and waded into the fray checking out among other links, wikipatterns.com. A number of times I was stymied by "sign in" requests - I suppose the wikis were private. I tried a link for astronomy teachers - thought that would be good - but the link was no longer operable. Then I proceeded onto the Springfield Township Virtual Library wiki and tried a number of links there as well. At educationalwikis.wikispaces.com I came across a number of interesting wikis including "Free Stuff for Science Teachers" (which I will definitely be visiting again) and "Kimistry" written as an educational tool wiki for chemistry and biology teachers by someone named Kim - very clever.

After searching through the aforementioned links in the assignment, I set up my free educator account at Wikispaces Educator, making sure to set the wiki permissions to "private". My wiki is a list of things to do in the garden - since that's what I've been concentrating on at home this week. A wiki like that could turn into what we used to see in the newsappaer on a weekly basis - a gardening column reminding people of what they should be planting, pruning, deadheading, watching out for(pests, diseases) and so on. I could see a wiki with this purpose being used by a garden club or simply by a group of friends.

At this time, I suppose I prefer the Google Docs to Wikis at present perhaps because I have been using Google Docs (in a very limited fashion) for this course. I can see, however, with some group assignments/projects that either would work exceptionally well as a collaborative tool for students.

Google Reader

Cool....I like Google Reader and not because I read EnglishTeacherWarrior's blog entry about it first. It's pretty cool how you can make files of your favorite blogs and podcasts. I also liked how Google Reader already had listed for me the blogs that I foolow from the 21st Century Skills class. To that list I added: NASA K-12 lesson plans (NASA Quest), Weather lesson plans (Free Online Weather School), NSTA (National Science Teachers' Association), Bad Astronomy, and NASA Earth and Space Science Education News (keeping track of Hubble images and so forth). (I know what you're thinking, I AM a real egg-head, so kid away!)

I watched, fascinated by the real time (mostly) news coverage, the Chilean earthquake aftermath this past weekend on TV. I was riveted to the TV set by the impending tsunami in Hawaii. Thank goodness the tsunami was very mild in most places, including Hawaii. When I subscribed to the NSTA blog feed, the first thing I saw was an article there from National Geographic entitled, "Chile Earthquake Tsunamis Smaller Than Expected - But Why?" Well, I had to click and read the story since the same question had been on my mind since this past Saturday. It turns out that the predicted tsunami in Hawaii was 4 feet and the actual tsunami was 3 feet - not a bad prediction at all considering the thousands of miles the waves had traveled across the Pacific! It was simply that most people had remembered the horrific 1960 tsunami in Hawaii and were expecting something similar although that was not what was predicted. Another reason the tsunami was not as bad, geologists hypothesize, was that the Chilean earthquake took place beneath shallower waters off the Chilean coast so the tsunami did not build as high as it would have had it been generated in deeper waters (think Indonesian tsunami several years ago). I am glad I found Google Reader so I could get this information. I don't know that I would have looked for an answer to my question about this weekend's tsunamis without the impetus of the Google Reader assignment. Thanks, Emily.