The Big Question

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Wednesdays Illawarra Regional Science Fair was a great success as usual. The students continue to astound me with their creativity and knowledge and after 7 years of judging I still look forward to spending the day with students passionate about their learning.

Well done to Kerry and the team.

Get started for next year, all the details here

Today we will have a look at a range of story telling tools that will allow your students to develop and showcase their understandings in a range of powerful ways. We will be exploring the following tools and I have placed them roughly in ease of use order.

Storybird – Tour

Storybird promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence. Its a simple writing and publishing tool that is quick, effective and powerful. Look here for the first attempt by a 5 year old. Drag and drop illustrations, text boxes and a quality product created quickly.

A very nice tool. Currently you are able to publish it to storybird, accept comments but not embed elsewhere. Students can collaborate on books.

Tikatok

Tikatok is an online creative community whose mission is to turn kids into published authors. Students can use their own illustrations and publish their book, even order real paperback and hardcover books.

Dvolver – Movie Maker

Create a text based, comic style movie with simple animation. Its very simple, quick and effective. No easy download at this stage or character voices but very easy to use.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

A powerful cartoon/animation creation tool. Choose your characters, background and exercise full control over voices, languages, gestures and framing. Students can create powerful movies, role plays, presentations and debates, quickly and free

Creating and enhancing your personal learning network to empower your profession learning.

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has created a list of the Top Tools for Learning, compiled by learning professionals, for the last 3 years.
Having regularly been caught up in the conversation with peers and eventually getting to the writing stage I thought it fair that I share them here. They are almost in order and many are about my professional learning but all are powerful learning tools.

Diigo – Social bookmarking and collaboration at its best. Its a jump to move from Delicious however well worth the effort for the collaboration and annotation capabilities.

Google reader - My staple for professional learning. Via RSS I am connected to the best educators from around the world.

You Tube – The worlds second biggest search engine, what cant you learn here?

Slideshare – A powerful way to extend students audience and a great way to learn from others.

iPhone/iPod/ Touch and apps – An amazing learning tool for all ages. The quality of the apps make it so powerful and I am continually amazed at how essential my iphone is.

Google search – Old school but still quick and effective

Wordpress – This could just as easily be edublogs, powerful blogging for students and teachers

Evernote – I need this. Organisation and retrieval of ideas and learnings made easy

Google Docs – Collaborative editing and sharing. Keeping things open and accessible

OpenSim – Virtual worlds are so powerful. Just working with and watching the students involved in creating Virtual Corpus Christi convinces of the power of developing creativity and opensim is a great place to do it.

A nice little presentation encouraging teachers to use Web 2.0 tools to create personal learning networks.

Today we will have a look at a range of story telling tools that will allow your students to develop and showcase their understandings in a range of powerful ways.We will be exploring the following tools and I have placed them roughly in ease of use order.

Storybird – Tour

A Tour of Storybird, a great reading and writing tool. Simple, quick and effective. Look here for the first attempt by a 5 year old. Drag and drop illustrations, text boxes and a quality product created quickly.

A very nice tool. Currently you are able to publish it to storybird, accept comments but not embed elsewhere. Students can collaborate.

Dvolver – Movie Maker

Dvolver creates creativity tools. Have you ever wanted to direct your own movie? No problem. Our MovieMaker helps you make a movie in a few simple steps. When your opus is complete send it to a friend. Or, post it to your website or myspace page. No easy download at this stage or character voices but very easy to use.

Whrrl – What’s your story?

Simple iphone friendly story telling, location, images and text, quite good for a procedural text or excursion report. Students can collaborate on projects. Really good with mobile technology.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

Easy Movie/cartoon making – Make 3d movies for free. Includes a range of languages, easy to use interface and a selection of backgrounds. Great for languages

GoAnimate

A very powerful animation tool, very flexible and fully featured. Much steeper learning curve than the other options tagged. Easy to embed or download the result. Top end product, very flexible.

My StoryMaker : Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects – and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, save it online or print it out in the Library. I really liked the way the story was made and the structure it provided for the students while writing. However the publishing and sharing options are very limited and I would suggest the child capturing the entire creation process with a screen capture tool.

Myths and Legends from E2BN

Welcome to Myths and Legends. This site is for pupils, teachers and all those who enjoy stories and storytelling. Make your own animated myths and legends. Really interesting voices and speech capabilities. I can see a range of uses within HSIE

Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. Nearly one thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Professor Sandel talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. Now it’s your turn to take the same journey in moral reflection that has captivated more than 14,000 students, as Harvard opens its classroom to the world.

This course as a 12-part series challenges us with difficult moral dilemmas. It could be a great resource in Religious Education and HSIE to engage students in bigger issues.

The video below will explain a little more.

Collaborating, Presenting and Publishing in your classroom – New Pedagogy

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The presentation from the Magdalene Staff Development day

During the session we explored

• Dfilm – is now Dvolver. Make your own movie with the
  

  Dvolver creates creativity tools. Have you ever wanted to direct your own movie? No problem. Our MovieMaker helps you make a movie in a few simple steps. When your opus is complete send it to a friend. Or, post it to your website or myspace page.

• Picasa Web Albums
  

  Easy and free web albums for schools. A number of our schools now use this to publish school photos and student work.

• YouTube – moviesfromsje’s Channel

  An example of a school youtube channel. This one is from the art department at St John the Evangelist at Nowra

• Woolley’s posterous – A demonstration site

  A demo posterous site. Just email anything to post@posterous.com at it will set up a blog for you and post the contents of your email.

• TrueTube – Education

  TrueTube is a free, website which uses real-life stories and issues to encourage teenagers to explore and debate the world of morality, ethics, politics and religion.

• Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

  Easy Movie/cartoon making – Make 3d movies for free. Includes a range of languages

• A N I M O T O: the end of slideshows

  Easy and visually cool. Make great videos very easily

• Arty Reflections » Welcome

  Student Art Blog, a great example of using a blog to share student work and encourage positive feedback. Evaluation and thinking skills are also embedded in the process

• SlideShare

  Share powerpoints online, easy and powerful sharing of presentations. Ability to comment and discuss presentations

One of our great challenges as teachers is encouraging students to use a wider range of presentation styles.

Movies can be a great way to bring a range of text types to life, making publishing and sharing student work much more accessable and increasing the access to and impact of their work.

Xtra Normal is a great example of a simple and powerful presentation tool that may be useful in your classroom. Students simply sign in, paste their product (text) into a text box and have it presented by a 3d avatar.  Students can choose from a range of backgrounds, characters, speech styles, expressions and more. Best of all its free.

The movie below is an example of a social justice project where students were working on a short information report on a ways to reduce your eco-footprint.

Note :- A first time user took 10 minutes to take their written content and create their movie.

Vegetarianism – reduce your eco-footprint

I am currently reading a great book John Hattie’s Visible Learning. The book aims to explore the influences on student learning and then review the evidence to support its impact.

Very interesting reading. I have just finished the section on “The Contributions from the Teacher” and made a summary of the top 4 elements from this chapter for those who are interested.

Micro Teaching – the process of preparing, delivering, getting evaluation/feedback and reflection on teaching is important. Teachers who micro teach have powerful effects on students. I believe this is due to the high level of evaluation involved in the practice. Video, peer evaluation and discussion can all lead to quality feedback and performance improvement.

Teacher Clarity – One of our DLFT elements Teacher Clarity or Explicit quality criteria is very important. There are significant positive impacts when the teacher communicates the intentions of the lesson and the notions of what success means for these intentions.

Teacher Student relationships – Person centred teachers make a large difference The affective outcomes that had the biggest impact were

1. Non directivity – A relationship that allows the individual to grow

2. Empathy

3. Warmth

4. Encouragement of higher order thinking

Professional Development – Professional Development is an effective way to improve job performance and satisfaction and has significant positive impact on the students.

I found this collection quite interesting, 4 contributions from the teacher that we can easily ensure become part of our teaching practice, confident that it will improve student outcomes. Why not give it a try?