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A while back primary six produced some Keepers Poems in response to the The Keepers Poetry Project

We have now started making some of these into flash movies, combining sound text and pictures:

Keepers Movies

The children have been creating the movies in Flash and I though it was worthwhile noting the workflow.

  1. The children wrote the original poems on paper as part of their language work.
  2. They illustrated them again on paper.
  3. These were scanned by a couple of children to jpeg files.
  4. We moved the files to another machine on a pen drive and the children resized and saved their images as gif files.
  5. The children then recorded the poems on our iPod using a Belkin iPod Voice Recorder, we are doing these a few at a time on a Tuesday morning, the children pop into the music room when it is not being used.
  6. At lunchtime on the Tuesday I collect a few children’s sound and image files and copy them onto the computers that have Flash. (the sounds can be edited and exported to MP3s quickly in Audacity.
  7. Tuesday afternoon the children create the files.
  8. They make a new flash file and place the image on the first layer.
  9. They then create another layer, import their sound file and place it on the second layer. They have to add frames to show the whole sound track.
  10. They add a third layer for the text. They add a text box with the first line of the poem on the first frame of the text layer. By playing the movie in flash they can see which frame the next lines starts on (in the sound clip), there they add a new keyframe and change the text to the next line of the poem.
  11. This is repeated for the third line of the poem. On the last frame they add another keyframe and change the text to the whole poem.
  12. I then add a stop() action to that keyframe, the children place a button on the frame and I add a script to go back to the first frame and play.

We have now done this on two Tuesdays the children from the first day supporting the ones on the second. I hope the whole class will have created a movie by the end of this term.

Hopefully they children are learning a bit about layers and frames in the process.

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We managed our second video conference with De Rank school in the Netherlands today. Sandaig Otters blog entry.

Due to technical wizardry, which includes a bridge by Learning and Teaching Scotland. Glasgow cannot allow IP dialling outside the network and ISDN all the way to Holland would be too expensive (as I understand it).

The De Rank children taught us some Dutch via large bits of card held up to the camera. Sandaig Children told the Dutch class about various Easter activities, using a wee slide show on the smartboard. The Glasgow accent is a little difficult for the Dutch children, I think we need to figure out a less vocal way of communicating. Less talk more pictures, or maybe some sort of mime to take advantage of the video?

A very motivating activity for the children involved, the whole class very positive about the experience.

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Shared Mobile learning, I’ve been reading a lot more of this since I came back lots of interesting stuff on the web, it fits in nicely with tagging/folksonomy Examples Flickr.com and http://del.icio.us/

Interestingly tagging seems to follow the long tail (also called Zipf power law!!!) that was mentioned at the conference.

del.icio.us is a web site where users store and tag links, you can view links by user and tags.

Eg all my del.icio.us links

My del.icio.us links tagged with education

and everybodies del.icio.us links tagged with education

Flickr does the same stuff with photos:

My Photos

My photos tagged with finland

Everybodies tagged with Finland

An article about folksononmy in guardian online 24 March and an earlier one

Neither of these services are child safe, but you could have quite an interesting site that would be.

For example:A site where classes/schools/pupils could upload photos and comments and tag them.

Groups form round tags/keywords invite classes to join in pictorial discussion eg on PSD keywords like ‘responsibility’ or ‘pride’ or’care’ or Art words ‘red’

Children/classes upload photos and scanns connected to tags with comments, classes can compare responses.

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I attended this conference in Finland last week! With 3 other Glasgow Masterclass teachers and Tom Kane of prescience our video conferencing guru. I was presenting about our video conferencing efforts with De Rank. Talked a bit about blogs too.

I saw a host of other presentations and took a few notes, I intended to write them up, but have not had the time, too many links to follow. So I’ve just pasted my notes below, not very coherent but the links are there.

It was a fantastic trip I took a pile of photos some here.

EuropeanSchools Project in Finland

COMP@CT- Start

ECOLEHOME
Thursday

Learning goes Mobile Riitta Vanska NOKIA

screensize

media agnostic

not top down=informal??

project based learning = informal contribute

sharing

info nugget=for the macdonnalds generation don’t really like this term

Collaborative Mobile learning demo

Jurgen Scheilb & Teemu Leinonen, Media Lab University of Art and Desigh Helsinki Interesting

Learning Environments for Progressive Inquiry Research Group

SHARING

learning tool (Director!!)

Saw demo next day, results were not so pretty,tool looks very basic mind map sort of thing.

FLICKr type interface in flash might be more interesting.

Mind you everyone at the conference is doing ‘Mobile learning’ taking photos of presenter’s slides rather than taking notes. Marilyn says info-snaps

Friday

Spring Day in Europe 17th march missed it!

eTwinning

SchoolJournalsOnline

ECOLEHOME

learner constructed learning objects

process not answers

Bottom Up

ECOLE Best Club

Saturday

We are limited by network and software for internet projects

FLOSSEPosse

Lots of competition for providing project web space Folk looking for sales

Dr. Sheila O. Gersh

Teachingwith the Internet

Culture Quest

this looks interesting as there does not seem to be the same emphasis on relying/organising with partners, could go it alone.

SKYPE

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The blog moved to a new server and we had a problem or two posting until we fixed some file permissions. But I seem t ohave the archive for this blog mixed up….

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I’ve spent a couple of hours deleting comment spam from the weblogs. So I’ve now installed pivot blacklist

for me one of the really great things about weblogs is getting feedback and the idea of starting conversations. I really hope I can keep this stuff off the logs and keep comments on.