Innovative Education in Vermont
Exploring innovative, personalized, student-centered school change
These 6th graders found a way to do some digital global storytelling with a green screen and their iPads.
They also managed to bust Tellagami’s animated personas out of the tablet, sending them around the world with a little green-screen magic.
Continue reading “Global storytelling with a green screen and iPads”
Flip the way you deliver content and engage students, but don’t stop there: flipping your space, your community and faculty meetings can be just as useful.
This is Amy Gibson’s fabulous (and brief!) tutorial video about the EasyBib Google Docs Add-On, which lets you easily create a works-cited page for any Google Doc. Now, I could’ve simply linked you all to her video and added a bunch of exclamation marks, but I wanted to point out a couple things I really like about this particular tutorial:
I’m going to tell you a secret: I have a teeny little attention span. I get easily distracted by Twitter, Pinterest, my dogs, stray gusts of wind, etc. And it’s way more engaging to watch a gesturing cartoon character narrate a screencast than a disembodied voice. Also, with a background that’s relatively fixed and um, un-dynamic, shall we say, the Tellagami provides a visual focus that makes everything more fun to look at.
EasyBib is indeed an easy way to locate, capture and format your online works cited, but Gibson mentions the all-important Check Your Source factor. Do not trust the internet. Check out what you’re citing, in case octopi don’t actually live in trees, and there’s not really an island sanctuary ruled by dogs.
Too many times when I’m watching tutorial videos do I find myself squinting at a GIANT desktop with an itty-bitty activity area. Or worse yet, the narrator will simply say “over there to the right” and I’ll squint in vain for where I’m supposed to follow along. I am old, people. Old and half-blind. Do me and all your other viewers a favor and use Skitch or Notability to add large, brightly colored arrows to your screencasts.
All in all, a terrific tutorial, but also a great example of how to create an engaging tutorial video. (And can you say “app-smash”? I can, and do. Often. App-smash!)
I’d love to see some folks try this with their students. Any takers?
Despite sounding like a weird potato-fruit dish, app-smashing gets your students thinking less about apps and more about tasks. Hopefully with a minimum of actual smashing.
App-smashing is when you give students a specific assignment that can best be solved using more than one app. iPads4Teachers has a fantastic overview of app-smashing here.
You got ’em!
Sylvia Duckworth, an elementary grades French teacher in Canada, created Mother’s Day video cards by taking screenshots with HaikuDeck, then importing those into iMovie to add voice and music. The result, you’ll agree, is simply smashing*!
A group of students at the Cabot School in Vermont tackled a cultural anthropology project by using iPhones to record audio interviews they did with community members, editing the audio in GarageBand, then embedding the results in a map with Thinglink. Smash!
Susan Hennessey put together the above video as part of an assignment for the MOOC Creativity: Music to My Ears. She writes:
We were tasked with picking a problem, brainstorming 100 possible solutions for how music could help solve it (on a shared Google doc) and then selecting 2 or 3 to create a novel solution. We were given 1-minute to present the problem and solution. Since we were working with middle level students, we wanted to defer to what they liked about the 100 possibilities. The two profiled by the Tellagamis are the top two selected.
Google Docs + Tellagamis + iMovie. A novel approach to the assignment, which, after all, is what app-smashing is all about.
*I’m actually obligated by law to make that pun at least once during this blogpost. True story.