Lessons Learned As the Student Podcasts Arrive

A creative, tech-savvy music teacher at my school gave her students the assignment to create a podcast about gamelan music, since that is what they have been studying. She sent a letter home to the families explaining the project and the due date.

To her delight, a few days later, the first podcast came in and it was far better than she had expected. We figured out how to easily attach it to her web site and waited for the rest to arrive.

Now that they are pouring in, we are needing to overcome some technical difficulties. Here are a few things we discovered.

• iTunes, or at least our flavor of it, wasn't liking the disks that came in in audio CD format. I assume they had been burned on a program such as Nero. Fortunately, we discovered that Real Player not only plays them, but by tweaking a preference, it will save them as mp3 files. This nicely compressed format was easy to upload to the website.

• Audacity is a great tool for podcasting, but its files aren't portable. Saving Audacity projects generates both a .aup file and a separate data file. We have a student who keeps bringing in the .aup file. Since he doesn't have the LAME encoder plugin for Audacity at home, we are trying to get him to use Audacity's export command to turn it into a .WAV file. From what we read online, that should make the file portable.
  

• Internet Explorer 7 doesn't have a very good upload engine; files move better with Firefox.
  

• mp4 files play with in Real Player. For some reason, the podcast that arrived in this format plays fine on the teacher's computer, but when we attach it to the web page, the link isn't playable in the browser and when you try to right-click it to download it, you get a page not found error. We are trying to use www.zamzar.com to convert it to mp3.

No word yet from the teacher as to whether or not Zamzar did the trick. It is a handy website that lets you upload a media file or enter a URL (think YouTube video), select a format you want, and then enter your email address. The site converts the file to the selected format and then sends you a download link.

This is one of many ways you can download YouTube videos. I haven't tried it in it's latest version. Our system engineers tell me it works well, but slowly. It took 3 hours to capture a 4o MB YouTube video, but it worked.

Anyone else assigning podcasts as homework for elementary students? How did it go? How did most students record them? What format were they saved in?

I'll post the URL when the teacher is ready for visitors.

Student-Created Avatars

As my colleague and I met a few months ago to plan out how to bring more multimedia and online goodness into our curriculum, the topic of avatars came up. They can be a fun part of developing an online identity, but we have so little time with our classes, were they worth the time?

That lead me to think about Moodle. A few years ago, I set up a Moodle for my fifth grade classes. We frequently used it to host our asynchronous discussions. From the start, some kids loved it. Quite a few others approached it with suspicion because it looked too much like work. They weren't connecting with it.

Then I got the idea of avatars. Moodle allows each user to upload an avatar which appears beside their screen name when they post into Moodle. Since our Moodle was private, I figured educational use of graphics allowed us to choose avatars from one of the many online sites offering them. To my surprise, it worked. Being able to personalize Moodle, even in only that small way, helped many of them connect and they began taking part much more.

Based on that experience, we decided that if time permitted, we would devote a short amount of one class period to creating avatars. If time didn't permit, they would go without.

Our first thought was to use Kerpoof since they have a kid-friendly avatar creator. Unfortunately, you have to create an account to make an avatar.

Our next idea was to create them in Kidpix. This had a few advantages. First, we have it and the kids know how to use it. Second, our students adore using it, but we haven't had much call to use it this year. Third, self-created images are free of royalty complications. Finally, it is difficult to create photo-realistic type of drawings in Kidpix so there is no danger of making the avatar too realistic if the child decided to do a self-portrait.

Here's how we did it. First we modeled using the rectangle tool to create a square, since so many programs crop avatars to a square shape. Then me modeled making our drawing be large, fill the square. I showed them an avatar still in Kidpix, then how it looked after it was in Voicethread so they could see how much the image would shrink. Finally, I showed them how to export their avatar as a JPEG file to their My Documents folder rather than to the network location that the network version of KidPix uses by default. Then they went to work.

I was impressed by the creativity the students showed. I had expected that they would make representational art, and some did, everything from sporting equipment to animals to cartoon-like portraits. However, Kidpix has so many tools that many kids created abstract images and were pleased with their final product.

I have a number of classes working on Voicethread projects but most aren't to the point of adding their avatars yet. However, my colleague is ahead of me on it and already he is seeing that the avatars are once again proving powerful, helping the students feel connected to the activity. They also make viewing the Voicethread feel more personal for the viewer.

Do your elementary-aged students have avatars for their online school identity? Did they make them themselves or use ready made avatars? Do you think the avatars are worth the effort?

For an insightful article regarding bloggers and the reasons for having an avatar, check out Sue Waters' recent blog post, Is Your Photo Avatar Making You Look OLD?.

Wikispaces Finally Has Text Formatting Toolbar

I've used Wikispaces for years. I've appreciated their teacher-friendly willingness to set up accounts for students who don't have email addresses (or who are under age 13 so are prevented by COPA from creating their own accounts.) I've loved their program to give away ad-free wikis to teachers. I've steered numerous teachers to consider Wikispaces.

However, many times, teachers would check it out and then disregard it because there were no text formatting options. What's a class poetry wiki without the ability to center text? What fun are color poems when you can't change text color?

Fortunately, those are now problems of the past because Wikispaces has added a text formatting toolbar that allows you to to easily change the color, style, size, alignment, and background color of your text.

I know my students will greatly appreciate these new formatting options. I see them as a blessing and a curse. They will allow us to make the pages more user-friendly, but they also allow the children yet another tool in which they can focus on style over substances. For some classes, the lack of options helped kids keep on task.

What do you think? Does the new text formatting toolbar affect your likelihood of using Wikispaces? Does it make you more or less likely to use it?

Do You Drupal?

Our school is very close to making the plunge and moving to Sharepoint. We need it to provide off site access to files, both individual and shared. We will most likely also use it for some of our web page needs for groups and departments.

Before we make the plunge, I'd like to hear more from people who are using Drupal for file storage. Is it working well? Have the roles and permissions available out of the box been enough for you? Or have you had to code your own changes? Does the search feature meet your needs? Any modules you'd strongly recommend or strongly NOT recommend?

One of our engineers has installed a demo version of Drupal and we hope to play with it this week, but as I've done my research, Drupal seems to be more of a toolbox than a product. It looks like you'd need lots of time on the forums to find the best modules for your needs. Is this indeed the case?

Thank you for any light you can shed.
(I have been reading forums, EdTech listserv, etc. I'm hoping that I can gather other information via this blog post.)

Google Does it Again

I don't know how long the link will be active because they don't usually leave them up very long, but Google has once again made a very enjoyable announcement on April 1. I hope you get to see it. After all, it's not every day that Google messes with the time-space continuum-- or is it?

Voicethreads, Flash, and the Problem with GPOs

The best laid plans...
After a few brave colleagues were kind enough to help us troubleshoot Voicethread.com last fall, we finally have everything working from within school. It involved a change in the proxy server settings, and the installation of Firefox, since there are know issues with Internet Explorer not playing well with Voicethread.

Two weeks ago I met with each grade level team to show them there wheres and whys of us spending much of this second semester using digital media applications with their students. It was fun to meet with the teams, celebrate that our students are doing so well on our current outcomes that we are able to add these highly engaging digital media applications to our curriculum. After giving them an overview of Windows Movie Maker, Voicethread and podcasting, I asked them to schedule a meeting with their tech integration teacher before the end of the month so we can work with them to integrate these technologies into their classroom curriculum in appropriate ways. Then I said I'd send them the links to the Voicethreads along with a calendar to help us plan.

Well, going on a week later, they still don't have those links. The first teacher I met with asked me to drop by that afternoon to show his class Voicethreads. When I did so I found that yes, the staff machines do now have Firefox, but because it was installed after the main build, the Adobe Flash plugin wasn't installed. On my machine, because I am local administrator on my machine, when the Voicethread site directed me to the Adobe Flash plugin download page, I followed it and was easily able to install the flash plugin and get down to business. This is not the case on my staff and students machines.

Being a Very Large Organization, my school uses GPOs to control groups of users on our Windows XP system. Currently, these GPOs do not allow .exe files to be saved to the My Docs or servers. They do allow saving to the C drive, but to do that with the Flash plugin requires skills that a number of my teachers don't have. And I don't want to teach my students to install on these computers.

As a result, I had to ask the IT Department to create a packet of Firefox with the Flash plugin installed, and then use SMS to push it through the system to each computer. Our IT Department is top notch and despite having a million other things to do, they did this for me.

I scheduled to occur during the school day because my busy teachers have a terrible time remembering to leave their computers on at night. The first day we ran the update, it didn't finish and it encountered many failures. I asked them to run it much earlier the next day. My assistant and I walked to ever computer to make sure it was turned on. We had a much higher success rate, but we still have around 20 computers that failed for some reason.

Walking through the building turning on every machine isn't a great use of our time. (Yes, the engineers should be able to turn the machines on remotely, but one brand of computers we have won't wake remotely.) Spending more than a day pushing updates through and tracking failures isn't a good use of our engineers time. And having staff without the skill to easily download a plugin to the local drive and install it is also a problem. If they can't do that here, they probably can't do it on their home machines either.

Those are just a few of the many reasons we are looking at making teachers local administrators of their work computers. IT Departments are always walking the narrow line between keeping the network stable enough that people are willing and able to use the technology, but open enough that it isn't a hindrance to getting their work done. It is time, in our organization to open things up a bit more.

Our current GPOs have done a great job of protecting our system. I think it has been remarkably reliable. However, it is now causing too many conflicts with software and with web sites. So much educational software is poorly written from a programmer's point of view. It breaks the rules of good coding, saves files in inappropriate places, and does a bunch of other things that make it not function with our GPOs. The software is worthwhile, just not well written. We experience this the most in our primary school which uses many educational games, and in our high school which uses many department specific types of software, such as foreign language software, science probes, CAD programs and smartphone software.

We've done some trials and loosening the GPOs is solving those problems. Since we are not making students local administrators, we will still have issues with some software titles. Hopefully, these changes will not greatly compromise the integrity of our network.

If this change is to be truly successful, it will take good teacher education. Some staff already have the skills needed to back up their own documents, run the anti-virus software each week, and make responsible decisions regarding what they install. For many staff members, frustrated that they can't update their iTunes software and constantly running out of space as they try new technologies, the change will be welcome.

For others, it will be a bunch of responsibility that they don't want for no tangible benefits. I see benefits, such as them learning how to do these things here so that they can also do them successfully at home. Part of being a professional educator is keeping their skills up to date. In this day and age, some of those skills involve technology. If they can't back up their files or run the anti-virus, is it likely that they are able to integrate technology in meaningful, rigorous ways? Possibly, but I think not likely.

Where is your school network on this continuum of safe but locked down, or open but more vulnerable? If yours is open, do staff back up their own personal files? Has it made your system less reliable? I'd love to hear from you.

It's No Longer My Blog (And That's a Good Thing!)

I've been writing lately about our first elementary blogging project at my school. Because this was our first attempt, I've been very hands-on. I have been teaching the lessons while the teacher assists both in class and by tracking down permission forms. We scheduled one extra lap visit per week so I could teach the introductory lessons, help edit blog posts, assist with publishing the first posts, approve the posts and moderate the comments.

I'm happy to say that the classroom teacher is gradually taking over. First, she figured out a rotation schedule for their silent reading time. Each day, x number of kids rotate through using the four classroom computers to write posts, reply to comments, and leave comment on our blog pals' blogs. No longer do they need to spend lab time blogging.

Today I took the next step and changed the blog email address from mine to hers. Now all comments will come to her to be approved. I'll also show her one more time how to approve blog posts, and then the system will be hers to run.

Thus far, she seems pleased with her students' excitement and their eagerness to read and write blog posts. This project is now supporting her classroom curriculum. I hope all my other integration projects go so well this term.

If you are a tech integrationalist, are you being successful at gradually releasing control of projects? Do you have any tips to share to help the rest of us do this well?

If you are a classroom teacher, what steps can tech integrationists take to help you feel more comfortable assuming control and responsibility of integration projects?

Kids, Comments, ClustrMaps and Clocks

On Monday the third graders were exuberant in their delight at finding comments on their blogs. At the start of class I reviewed how to find their post using the category list, and then how to open their comments.

I warned them that the teachers who visited their blogs over the weekend might never visit again, so any replies we left for them might never reach their intended audience. To my surprise, that did not daunt the children. They still wanted to reply before working on their new posts. As is typical with this great group of kids, most put quite a bit of thought into their replies. They have the makings of fine bloggers.

Unfortunately, I am not doing as well. I did finally get the Clustr map working on our site -- I'd love it if a few people would now visit the blog so it would start registering visitors. However, now I can't even get the Widgetbox widgets to work on the site.

I had a clock working before, but took it out because it was so ugly. However, since my attempts to make other widgets work failed, I wanted to put the ugly clock back on so our blog pals could compare their time with our time. No such luck.

I have watched the videos in Learnerblogs that shows how to insert widgets. The problem is caused by many widgets using javascript, which isn't allowed in Learnerblogs; it will break them. So, the video shows you how to paste the code from the Widgetbox widget into a text editor and extract the panel ID. That is what I did last week that worked so well. Now, the widget code doesn't have a panel ID when I paste it. It has a different ID and that one isn't working when pasted into the widgetbox widget holder on the blog. I am NOT amused.

Non-Widgetbox widgets need to be inserted in text widgets in Learnerblogs. However, if they contain javascript, Learnerblogs automatically strips it out. Google Gadgets all seem to use javascript. Does anyone know where I can find a well behaved javascript-free clock?

The Kindness of Twitter Friends - or- My PLN Saves the Day Again

All but four of the third graders have published their first blog post. They are eagerly awaiting comments. Unfortunately, I know that the person coordinating the project in Bangkok has been out of town, and our Pennsylvania group hadn't started blogging, so our blog pals would not be visiting our site for a while yet.

Knowing how disappointed the children would be to come to class on Monday and still have no comments, I sent out a quick tweet on Twitter asking for people to comment on the blog posts. Then I went to bed.

When I checked Twitter the next day. I had a message from one kind teacher who had already left some comments. However, I had message from a number of other helpful teachers saying they had tried to leave comments, but were told they had to log in first.

Then I remembered that we had ticked the Learnerblog setting that required people to login to Learnerblogs before they could comment. We had done that to prevent spam, but it was now preventing legitimate comments, so we decided to change that setting.

After a long search, I finally located that setting again, and then I sent out another Tweet. In short order, numerous teachers had left comments for EACH student. Some of the teachers had lived in Singapore or visited Singapore so they were able to personalize their comments to address experiences the children are likely to have had. One of the commenters had attended our school as child, and later had taught at it. All in all, their comments were the thoughtful, well-written type that will serve as powerful models for our students as they comment on other blogs.

Even more importantly, when they visit my lab tomorrow, every single one of those bloggers will feel the thrill and validation that comes from having connected, at least briefly, with another person via their writing. THANK YOU to each of you who made it happen. Know that you have made a difference.

Overcoming Commenting Problems with Learnerblogs

Last week our third graders published their first blog posts. Then they visited our blog pals site and started leaving comments. After I modeled how to leave a comment, they were very eager to begin, (and very intrigued with the need to type the code they saw in the comment box to prove that they are a human and not a spambot.)

Other years, with other classes on other blogging platforms, I had run into the issue of some blog sites not allowing very many consecutive posts from the same person within a short period of time. I assume that system is in place to prevent spambot attacks.

I had hoped to get around it by having my students used linked Gmail accounts as the address they used when posting comments. (If you aren't familiar with linked Gmail accounts, read Kim Cofinio's great post about them here.) However, after about 10 minutes, the students started receiving screens telling them to slow down on their commenting. The linked Gmail addresses weren't solving the problem.

Next, the teacher and I ran around entering first our school email addresses and then my personal address, but that didn't solve the problem. Evidentally, the system was tracking our domain or IP addresses, not the email address.

I don't know how to get around that, except to only have a few students comment per session. That makes it seem like commenting could best be done by a few children at a time in the classroom rather than the entire class in the computer lab.

Another solution is to have more than one class blog to visit. Fortunately, we are in position to use the latter solution. Since this blogpal project has begun, we have added classes in Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin to our blog roll.

Another minor problem we encountered involved comment moderation. We have not paired up the students in this project. They don't have one blog pal; they are free to comment on posts by anyone in the other class. This avoids the problem of students not getting on well with their partner, or of prolific writers being paired with less enthusiastic writers. However, it leaves open the possibility of some children not receiving many responses. Our class decided that we would try, at least this first time, to make certain that every one of our blog pals received at least one comment.

It was a noble goal, but since both class blogs have enabled comment moderation, we couldn't tell which blogs had already been commented on by our class, so we quickly abandoned that strategy. Fortunately, before we had begun commenting, I pointed how how to navigate their blog using the category links and the calendar, so hopefully students whose post was no longer visible on the front page also received comments.

Now we just need to wait for their teacher to approve the comments, and for them to visit our blog.

What I've Learned So Far Using Learnerblogs.org

About a month ago, Kim Cofino blogged that she was looking for a simple, writing based, collaborative project for her third graders. I was just thinking about the online pen pal project I'd done with a third grade class last year, so I Skyped her. In about 20 minutes, we hashed out the preliminary details for a blog pals project.

We both wanted a project that would encourage reading and writing, and we didn't want the technology to get in the way. We decided to use a free, multi-user Wordpress blog from Learnerblogs.org. This allowed each class to have one student login, and one place for the other class to visit, making it easy for the students to find their way around. Making a category for each child allows visitors to quickly view all of that child's posts, making it look like each child has their own blog.

Kim developed an excellent set of preliminary lessons that we used with both classes. This time spent up front was well spent. By the time students finally got down to writing, they were very eager to begin and well-informed. I wouldn't change a thing except to possibly add one more day where they can read blogs. We read blogs the day we researched common blog features, but they really wanted to read the posts, not skim the pages looking for commonalities.

Last week the children wrote their first posts in Microsoft Word and then pasted them into the blog. I didn't like how small the font was on the blog so I did a bit of research. First I tried other themes, but each had its own problems, so we returned to our original theme.

Next I looked for plug-ins. I didn't find very many for this multi-user platform. However, one I did find was a more full-featured text editor. It included a button that makes it easy to paste text copied from Microsoft Word. I've only had the chance to use it with a few students, but their posts came in at a more reasonable font size.

I also wanted to customize the header to a Singapore-related image. In the Creative Commons section of Flickr I found a number of panoramic Singapore skyline photos that included the durian-shaped Esplanade building, our most-distinctive building.

With those two changes in place, I only have two more wishes. I want to add clocks that show the local time of each of our blog pals (we now have blogpals in Pennsylvania and Florida in addition to our original Bangkok blogpals.) I can successfully add Widgetbox brand widgets, but none of these have the look I want. When I try to add any other widgets, I am unsuccessful. I also want to add a Clustr map. I subscribed so we have a map that we can use, but I'm not having any luck getting it onto our Learnerblog. I can get them to work on Edublogs, but not Learnerblogs. If you have added non-Widgetbox widgets to a Learnerblogs.org blog, I'd really appreciate hearing from you.

If you would like to make a group of third graders really happy, drop by and leave them a comment. And be sure to mention where you are writing from, since the Clustr map isn't working yet.

Need Suggestions on Best Way to Let Homebound Participate

We have an amazing student who is finally home after months in the hospital. On Friday, her class visited her. She has a long ways to go before she can return to school. In the meantime, we'd like to have her take part in one class per day. I'd appreciate suggestions on how best to do this.

On her end, she has a computer with a web cam and a tech savvy father. On our end, we will get whatever we need to make this work.

Some factors to consider:

• We want the student to have as rich an experience as possible.
• She will be able to see and hear and speak, but she is not able to type or use the mouse on her own.
  
• She is an elementary students and her class is a mostly self-contained so we only need to set up one classroom with AV equipment.
• The classroom has a data projector and the teacher's computer has a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. The computer's sound can be broadcast through wall speakers. The classroom also has a PA system with an amplifier and a wireless mic.
  
• We are installing Skype, and hopefully I will soon have a Yugma account. We have web cams and video cameras.
• There is an aide in the classroom who can run the camera. She can switch the focus from the teacher to the whiteboard to the students as needed.

Concerns I have:

• I don't know if our web cam (or any web cam) has enough focal depth to be able to see the whiteboard or to refocus on people at different distances.
• A video camera would probably be a better choice in terms of focal length and picking up voices across the room. However, I don't know if our computers or their computers could handle the data stream.
  
• The teacher would like her to be able to read the whiteboard at times when it is crucial to the lesson.
• This needs to be stable. If it is bogging down or crashing, it will get in the way of instruction.

Our first thought is Skype. We are going to play with it with a web cam. Maybe it won't be too limiting. Another thought is Elluminate's vRoom. It allows for 3 participants, so the student, the teacher's computer and another student in the class could all be on. The teacher could use the whiteboard feature. She has a data projector and a wireless mouse and keyboard so she could use those from the front of the room. It will also handle the video. The teacher can make herself and the student both have the microphone so she can talk with the teacher and the class. The teacher could use this option for tutoring after school as well.

Will either of these work? Do you have a better solution to suggest? Any ideas on how to tweak either of these options for optimal performance? Please let me know. I dearly want to make this work and make it work soon.

A Trip to the Virtual Staffroom

Last Sunday I had the honor of chatting with Chris Betcher and Kim Cofino on Skype. Chris polished the discussion and posted it as a podcast on his Virtual Staffroom blog. Our topic of discussions was, appropriately enough, teaching tech.

This was my first time being part of any podcast and I want to thank Chris for making it all so easy. He is a talented interviewer and a gracious host so a good time was had by all.

If you have any interest in it, go check out the podcast. Or better yet, use iTunes to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of his entertaining and informative podcast.

(And three cheers for my old iBook G4 which delights in bonking during Skye calls but was kind enough to work without flaw for the entire session. Maybe it knows how much I'd like a Macbook Air...)

Solve the Tech Teacher Substitute Dilemma?

I think that most classroom teachers would agree that preparing a for a substitute teacher is often more work than it is worth. As a technology integrationalist for part of the day, my sub plans can either be incredibly easy (e.g. keyboarding for first 20 minutes, TimezAttach or Freerice.com for rest of class) or incredibly challenging, especially if I don't know who my substitute will be, or if I know the person is not comfortable with technology, doesn't know their way around our computers.

Since we have returned to work this January, I have missed all or a portion of 7 days for training. It has been great to be a student, but more challenging that usual to prepare for the substitute.

With some units, I teach the skills and then the classroom teacher finishes up on their own time. For example, last week a teacher asked me to show the students how to create a timeline in Excel. They had never used the program before and so I got them started. She had prepped them before hand by having them decide which of their own life milestones were going to be on the timeline, so I spent ten minutes teaching them the tech side and then they were ready to roll. She scheduled lab time during the week to finish the project. Easy.

Unfortunately, I only see my students once per week for 45 minutes and I'm trying to finish my web design unit. If I were using Contribute with my students, then I could reasonably ask my teachers to finish up the pages with their classes since they use that to maintain their class pages. However, I've been teaching the students to actually write the HTML tags, writing their pages by hand. I cannot ask a teacher to do that.

I was gone three days of the first week back to work after the Christmas holiday. That meant the kids had forgotten a lot. Not wanting to have so much time lost, I tried to leave a lesson plan that let the students keep working. It sounds like it met with limited success. My students remembered too little and she couldn't support. It was a setup for all of them and I realized that I should have left a one off lesson instead.

Then today I read Sylvia Martinez's post entitled Students as Substitutes. That wouldn't be a good choice for unplanned absences, but for a time like this, where I knew weeks in advance that I was going to be absent, this could have been a great solution. I especially like this idea for my fourth and fifth grade classes; my lessons for third graders are usually easy enough for any sub to teach, especially since my assistant (who is NOT a teaching assistant) is very willing to drop by before school to help the substitute get up to speed.

Part of my recent spate of training was 3 days spent with the amazing Jenny Black at Tanglin Trust School to work on my Promethean ActivStudio Curriculum Developer certification. I am now more eager than ever to get my students creating flipcharts instead of just using them. I would so love to see the end of Powerpoint instruction and see its use diminish, since it is such a challenge to helps students create truly engaging presentations with it.

Picture instead that with a substitute on hand, they were taking turns using their self-prepared flipcharts to teach their classmates a new skill. Even if they run into troubles with the IWB, since all of the students would have been creating flipcharts, then they should all be able to help; the software is not rock science. However, unlike Powerpoint, I think the Activstudio software could encourage students to develop more interactive features in their presentations. Just as they love the animations and sounds in Powerpoint, I think they would love the actions, sounds, containers and ability to embed things in flip charts. I rarely see a good Powerpoint inspire other students to do better work, but just like good student-made web pages challenge many other students to improve their own pages, I think a clever student-made flipchart would spur on other students to meet the challenge.

Next steps for me include getting more copies of the ActivStudio software. 6 copies come with each board. Right now I have 8 boards and 8 copies of the software installed, plus one lab installed. I either need to move those lab installs to my lab, or get more copies. Also need to re-explore the student use of the Activstudio software. Last fall Kent had discovered that at the Promethean Planet website there was a page where students could download the software. I can't remember if it was the full version, but it was not just a player; students could use it to create flipcharts at home!!

So, what about you? Have you ever had students teach when you were absent? If not, could you? Would you? Why or why not?

Learning from My Online Project Mistakes

As usual, Graham Wegner is making me think. He posted a great parable about online collaborative projects and it's forcing me to rethink an experience I had last year that I never paused to reflect upon because it felt like a failure.

Graham's parable shows some of the challenges of coordinating an online collaborative project. I've been on both sides of this parable. Mostly I'm on the tech coach side, but after my experience last year of taking part and then disappearing from a good online collaboration, I've learned that even with all my tech experience, I can make a mess of it.

Differing schedules, teacher's declining, no class of my own all contributed to my failure. I had joined the project was to force myself to do more with wikis, more with Flickr, but the project itself kept getting more complex, having more requirements and steps to follow until, for me, it collapsed under its own weight.

Now that Graham has brought this experience back into my focus, I'm realizing I can take quite a bit of learning away from the experience...

• Start really simple. If the students can't do most of it themselves, then chances are, I'll learn far more than they do. Nothing wrong with me learning a lot, but teaching time is too short for me to do things that don't greatly benefit the students.
  
  
• Similarly, start small. Online projects often require a huge amount of communication and ongoing planning by the teachers. The more teachers, the more people who must be consulted at each step. The more people involved, the more formal a process may be needed to manage it all. Sometimes, just having two teachers, two classes will be the most effective, despite all that could be gained from having more kids in more places involved. Likewise, start with a shorter termed project. If it rocks your socks you can extend it.
  
  
• Be very clear what you want the students to get out of it. Use backward design to fit the project to the learning and not the other way around, as is so tempting with new tech tools.
  
  
• Check, check and recheck access before committing. My account at work has more privileges than student and teacher accounts. Didn't think to check access when logged in as one of them, until we were into the project. They couldn't add comments to the wiki. They couldn't upload to it either. And the wiki only allowed so many comments per hour from the same person, so I couldn't log them all in as me.
  
  
• Upfront, try to make a realistic prediction of the time commitment and the the skills needed. Make those estimates based on the time it will take a new user, not you who have been experimenting with the tools for months. Based on the little I have done with online projects, I'd say double the time you think it will take, both in class and outside of class.
  
  
• Consider all the schools' vacation schedules when creating the project calendar. Also note end of term, standardized exams, etc.
  
  
• Keep communicating even when the ship is going down. I expressed my frustrations minimally and then bailed. I wish I'd had the guts to stay in longer or at least take my leave more gracefully. I really enjoyed the people in it, but after three months, it felt like it was pulling me under. I was so much happier when that weight was gone. I don't think relief is what we should feel at the end of collaborations.
  

Next time I feel tempted to dive into a project, I'll reread Kim Cofino's wise words about planning and implementing social networking projects. She has been involved in many successful projects. Her post comes from a place of wisdom and experience.

In the mean time, what tips can you add to my list? What else should we keep in mind as we embark on collaborative projects?

-

St. Paul Paper has article on XO

Nice Associated Press article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper about the XO's reception in Peru. Good to see more coverage.

XO Pros and Cons

Okay, I'm back home on a regular keyboard so I can reflect a bit on my XO experience so far.

I've just begun to explore the One Laptop Per Child XO computer. I purchased it as part of OLPC's Give-One-Get-One program. Here are some initial thoughts...

Pros

• Great software set for kids. It comes with a great collection of constructive software that encourages kids to explore, create, experiment. I think many of my students would come with such a strong schema of "computer" that they would have trouble diving in and figuring things out. I hope kids in developing nations find that easier.
  
  
• Wide variety of applications. The XO ships with a great variety of apps already installed, from photo, video and recording, music creation, measurement, writing, drawing, painting, web browsing, chatting, programming, memory games. There are more available online and still more in development, including Scratch. Can't wait for that!
  
  
• Amazingly strong wi-fi receiver. My old ibook has a good antenna in it, often finding 5 or 6 more networks than Kent's Powerbook can detect. The XO has a much farther range than my ibook, and it is just a click to access unsecured networks, such as coffee shop wi-fi.
  
  
• I don't have access to a second XO or I'd be testing out the mesh networks. Get two XOs in range of each other and they automatically form a mesh network. That in itself is interesting. When you realize that MANY of the applications on the XO are collaborative, then the idea of mesh network becomes amazing. I can invite you to collaborate with me on my picture, my story, my music. I can even invite you to browse the web with me.
  
  
• Visually appealing. I was sitting in a coffee shop today near a window and people on the other side of the window kept stopping to look at it. I would have been interested to see children's reactions to it, but none came by.
  
  
• Expandable. I just bought a 4 GB SDHC card. There is a slot under the monitor. It slides right in. You can't run apps off of it, but you can store files there. Has 3 USB ports so I can plug in mouse, keyboard, thumb drive or other peripheral goodness.
  
  
• Sturdy. Light, rugged, easy to carry (built-in handle), sealed keyboard.
  
  
• Great community. There are already good resources online. Here are a few I've used the most:
• Support FAQ- OLPC Wiki
  
• OLPC News Forum
• OLPC Forum - fyx.us
• One Laptop Per Child News

Cons

• Tiny keyboard. That's GREAT for its intended users, but is making me crazy. I've ordered a folding keyboard to use with it.
  
  
• Slow typing. I can type much faster than the letters can appear on the screen. Not sure why that is. It doesn't seem to matter if I get way ahead of the display. The letters get there eventually. However, I can't check for typos as I type.
  
  
• Lots of lag time. Slow to start. Web pages were slow to load. Slow to switch between home and a running app.
  
  
• Track pad is a bit dodgy. I've grown too used to my mouse with the scroll wheel and the the ability to scroll from my ibook's trackpad. The XO's trackpad doesn't scroll the window. Mine isn't very well callibrated. I've recallibrated it and that helped, but it is still tricky to click exactly where I want to type. It is also slow. I haven't found a place to speed it up.
  
  
• Bookmarks are temporary. They persist until I close the browser, then they are gone. I hope this is a bug that will be fixed.
  
  
• No tabbed browsing. Didn't realize how dependent I was on browser tabs until they were gone. I can open more than one copy of the browser, and move between them via the home screen.
  
  
• News Reader isn't working. Not with the subscriptions already in it. Not with ones I tried to add.

Of course, the biggest Pro is that if you buy one, a child in a developing nation receives one as well. Pros don't get much bigger than that.

I'd love to hear from you if you have one. How is it working for you? Any killer apps you've found? What do you love/hate about it?

Photo by Manu Contreras

Written on my XO

This is my first entry from my XO laptop. (It will be short because the keyboard is too small for me to touch type on it and the spacebar requires a heavy hand.)

I am just starting to use it. I am impressed that I can access Blogger Dashboard with the Browse program.

More later when I am on a full-sized keyboard.

For Your Listening Pleasure...

The last few weeks have been amazing at my school. The Learning 2.0 Conference started it last September. Then the Laptop/Wi-fi pilot in the high school helped key people start seeing the shift that needs to happen. Vision planning and strategic planning are making evident the need for 21st Century teaching and learning skills. All of it deserves to be blogged.

However, it is Friday night. I've been worked on budget stuff until the wee hours. It seems a better use of my time to introduce you to this amazing kid. Enjoy!


(Thanks to Chris Sloan for posting it.)

Creating Comics Online

A teacher asked me to recommend a comic strip program that will allow the students to add a few sentences of text and have a number of panes. I hadn't looked at comic strip programs since last year, so I decided to see what I could find. Here is a summary of my research.

[NOTE: After experimenting with different ways to show the strips in this post, I decided to put them in my Flickr account and then upload them here full size even though the strip gets truncated. Any other way shrunk the strip so much you couldn't see enough of the detail to get a feel for the program. Clicking on any of the comic strips in this post will take you to the full strip in Flickr.]


MakeBeliefsComix.com

I had a brief chance to use MakeBeliefsComix.com last year with students.

Pros

• No registration required.
• Strips can be 1-4 panes long.
• 15 characters to choose from, each of which can be flipped to face the other way. Each has 4 expressions.
• There are writing prompts that drop down from each pane to help the cartoonist flesh out their strip.
• Very easy to flip, scale, move or delete objects.
• Lack of background choices, props, and limited number of characters means students will get down to work more quickly.
• Invitations to view the strips can be emailed to people.
• No comments from viewers allowed, so no need to monitor them.
• No gallery of comics that were created by other people, so no need to worry about objectionable content.
• Many teacher resources on the site.

Cons

• Talk balloons can only contain 7 lines of text.
• Lack of background scenes and props may limit the types of cartoons created.
• When I emailed myself the link, the linked cartoon had a rendering error. One of the characters appeared in a frame twice. The strip did not look like that when I sent the link.
• Site URL is tricky because of the "s" after beliefs and the "x" in Comix. Students found it difficult to type correctly.

StripCreator

I found StripCreator via a Google search tonight.

Pros

• Has different character sets and each character in a set has 2 positions.
• Has different background sets such as urban, rural, fantasy.
• Can handle large talk balloons.
• Choice of 1-3 panes.
• Good privacy controls. You decide if your email is visible. You decide if your comic strips are public or private. You decide whether or not to allow visitors to leave comments.

Cons

• A bit tedious when setting up the same scene for each pane; no way to set it once and have it persist for all the panes.
• No way to email your comics or embed them into blogs or wikis. Could not right-click-save the strip; I only got that element that I was clicking on.
• There may be objectionable cartoons on the site. There is a gallery of strips created by other users.
• Down at the very bottom of the home page is a link to the creator's Brad Sucks site which is where you buy creator's music CD. It is all innocuous, but having the word "sucks" on the page may make it objectionable to some teachers.
• Had a rendering error that I couldn't fix- the broken park bench in the first frame.
• Requires email address to register. It sends you the password which is not easy to remember. Fortunately, you can change your password after you log in.

ToonDoo

• I had heard of ToonDoo and was surprised to find I already have an account there. However, the feeble efforts in there tell me I didn't play with it for long. This is the most complex of the web apps I surveyed tonight. I was getting tired by this time, so the strip I created is a bit discombobulated.
  
  
  
  

Pros

• This is the most full-featured of the programs I tried. It has many pallettes of characters, backgrounds, props, and talk bubbles.
• Much flexibility, provides lots of options so can be used to create a wide-range of strips.
• Looks professional; I think students would be pleased with how good their comic strip looked.
• Can handle lots of text. You can click a button and the talk balloon to make it fit better.
• Create strips from 1-3 panels.
• Can create online comic books! You could tell entire stories! Check out this Learn A New Word ToonBook.
• You can upload photos to integrate them into the comic strip.
• You can alter the facial characteristics of the ready-made characters. I didn't try out this feature so I can't comment on how well it works.
• Has buttons to allow you to embed, email, and tag comics you view or make.
  

Cons

• The many palettes were slow to load. May have been my connection since my Starhub often slows to a crawl at night, but other pages are loading fine.
• The large array of options may prove insurmountable; some children would spend all their time searching through the palettes and never finish their strip.
• Text doesn't wrap; you need to hit returns to keep the text within the pane as you type.
• There may be objectionable cartoons on the site. There is a gallery of strips created by other users.
• Site requires an email address to register.

Now it's your turn. What online comic creation apps have I missed? Do you have experience using any of these programs with students? Any words of wisdom to share?