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.
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?.
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?
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.)
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?
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.
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