Looking for ways to explore digital identity with students? Here are 4 student-centered, tech-rich digital identity exercises for working with students. As a bonus, all the exercises produce media that students can add to their digital portfolios. Let’s watch!
As the end of June nears and students take their final exams, clear out their lockers, and begin sleeping in until noon, teachers are gathering their remaining energy, and administrators are giving them space, to take stock of the year, celebrate the successes and challenges, and together learn from them.
But what’s the best way to assess technology-rich instruction and the 1:1 environment?
Deepen place-based learning and boost emotional engagement
Having signed the permission slips, helped raise money, converted US dollars to Canadian, and reviewed the itinerary multiple times, I attended an information night for my daughters’ end-of-year field trip: a 3-day adventure in Quebec City. I learned (among other things) how to be certain if mobile devices made their way across the border, how to turn off data plans to avoid being charged outrageous fees. I thank the organizers tremendously for reminding us about this issue.
What I didn’t hear though was how mobile devices might be used to enhance learning on this trip.The power of these devices in students’ hands while they explore seems too powerful to pass up.
It’s super-fun to make book trailers to embed in book covers with Aurasma, but how much cooler would it be to see your friend explain *in person* why they liked that book?
You know this would rock! And be time-effective for getting a bunch of different students’ opinions embedded in your newest library display.
Absolutely doable. App-smash Touchcast with Aurasma and boom! Hear from actual, real-live people made tiny in book covers.
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.
“For one language arts class project, a middle school teacher in Shelburne, Virginia, Chad Sansing, asks his sixth graders to read Peter Cherches’s 1986 poem “Lift Your Right Arm,” and then translate it into computer code.” Fascinating look at transmedia, a 21st century term for using more than one media platform to tell a story or teach a concept. (via @sljournal)
It’s that magical, magical time of the year again!
No, not the end of the school year. (STOP THAT.)
I meant it’s the time of year when your students have a lot of opportunities to share out their year’s worth of learning. And here are 4 great apps for creating presentations on your iPad.
1. Touchcast
Touchcast lets students pull links, videos and even interactive polls directly into their videos, as well as letting them easily create scenes in front of a green screen. Imaginary assignment: Have your students file an on-the-spot “news report” from locations around the globe. Also underwater. And from the center of the earth. And in space.
Seriously, someone should do this. Then send us the link, and we’ll showcase your students’ work on this blog. Is that a deal or what?
8th grade scientists in Morrisville, VT, made this series of Touchcast presentations to illustrate distance over time. STEM-tastic!
2. Aurasma
Check it out: you can now make auras directly from the iPad, inside the Aurasma app. A great opportunity to app-smash: have the student video themselves with the iPad’s camera, edit it in holy of holies iMovie, then embed the resultant polished product into a real-world artifact, like their school portrait, or a painting, or a hand-illustrated map of the U.S. Get a whole class-worth’s together and create an Aurasma-powered scavenger hunt around school for parents and visitors. Aurasma’s channel feature means that you control who sees the work, too.
Boom! End-of-year project sorted! All before your second cup of coffee!
Below, this music teacher pinned sheet music up, then embedded videos of student performances in those sheets. Y’all, teachers are so. Clever.
3. Animoto
Personally, I find Animoto the easiest app of the bunch to use when, for instance, you have a bunch of photos you just want to assemble into a montage (“Mon-tage!”) with some cheezy inspiring music laid over the top. It really is just two steps: first, tap tap tap each photo you want to include in the montage (“Mon-tage!”), then pick your music. DONE.
Here’s one I made earlier!
4. HaikuDeck
Educator Mike Pall created this HaikuDeck to offer students tips on shooting great Instagram videos.
HaikuDeck‘s both easy to use and creates a polished, SlideShare-worthy presentation that, without audio, depends heavily on narrative and visual storytelling to engage the audience. It calls on a different set of cognitive skills and really makes students focus on the message over presentation style.
So! Those are my 4 favorites, but this educator found a whopping 15! Which ones do you use?
It’s spring (unless you’re in the Antipodes) and IT HAS FINALLY STOPPED SNOWING. Yes, all those capital letters are really necessary to announce that fact. The sun is out and if you’re planning on doing some outside work with your students, here are four activity ideas for using iPads outside when there’s no access to Wifi.
1. The Basics: QR code scavenger hunt
Make and print some QR codes, tape them up outside, and have each code lead to an image with directions for an activity. Working on foreign language acquisition? Post the directions in the target language! Are fractions on the agenda? Have the QR codes lead to an equation whose solution equals a number found in the next location of the hunt! Vocab time? How about anagrams that unscramble to reveal the next location or a key part of the instructions! QR codes are simple, powerful and lend themselves to a ton of different activities. What would make it really powerful would be for the students themselves to create the questions…
This online QR Code Treasure Hunt Generator lets you create your hunt quickly and easily beforehand.
2. App-smash with Dino Defend!
Students break into groups, pick a plastic dinosaur out of a bucket (blind pick) and then have to keep their dinosaur alive to the end of the trail. As they move through the landscape, they’ll need to complete and document 4 challenges related to their dinosaur. Challenges could have math, science and reading comprehension worked in, as well as compelling students to really think about the Gorge and evolutionary geology. So many apps could help answer the following challenges:
Geography: What features of the landscape would prove beneficial/problematic for your dinosaur? Suggested apps: 30Hands, Notability
Famine/Overpopulation: What does your dinosaur eat? What could they eat in this area? Suggested apps: HaikuDeck, Notability
Predator attack: What are some of your dinosaur’s predators? Are they or were they found in this area? Bonus points for teaming up with another group and enacting a pitched battle scene. Suggested apps: iMovie.
Defamation! An upstart archeologist has written a tract all about how your dinosaur should go extinct already. Each dinosaur has been offered a 30-second video promo spot to respond to the allegations. How does your dinosaur explain its value to the environment? Suggested apps: Touchcast, iMovie
Please note: badgers, bears, frogs or any other type of animal can be substituted for the dinosaurs, as appropriate for your curriculum.
But it just won’t be the same without all those RAR noises.
“Predator Challenge! This diplodocus is about to be eaten by a giant Boston terrier. In 200 words, explain why this situation is implausible.”
3. Collect & Reflect with Picture This
Colorado educator Anne Beninghof came up with the great idea of using the Corkulous app to let students assemble boards that feature audio, video, image and written reflections of their trek. Get creative, assign each group a different theme, area of the landscape or time period to work with. This could also work with LinoIt.
4. For the Math folks: AngleJam!
The FieldProjector app allows you to calculate the angles of objects captured with the iPad camera, as well as determining their scale in relation to other objects. Combine this with the QR codes to create a series of challenges around capturing different types of angles:
“It’s time for the annual AngleJam but sadly, no angles have shown up yet to the party! They’re too busy running wiiiiiiiiiiild. It’s up to you to go out and grab them. Head outside / to the jungle gym / to the trailhead, where you’ll find a QR code specifying how to bring in the first of your math guests.”
“The 90 has been spotted! Repeat: we have a visual on the 90! Invitation delivered!”
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading out into this beautiful sunshine to help a stegosaurus work on using less tail-spike in its rebuttal. Have a great weekend, everyone!
*This post grew from a discussion over on the iPadEd Google+ community. Joyful thanks to Lara Jensen, Karen Redmond, Peggy Matthews, Karie Carpenter, Anne Beninghof, Robert Payne, Lee MacArthur, Laura Mahoney, Jose Luis Gutierrez and Christopher Averill for the brainstorming.
“An alien named Athena lives on Mars, and goes to school. Athena’s house is a spaceship. When she left to go to school, she realized she left something about half way….”
Rachel Goodale’s 8th grade science class at Peoples Academy Middle Level was honored yesterday for their series of speed graph Touchcasts by the makers of the app. The EduCast Pioneer award honors outstanding implementations of the Touchcast iOS app in the classroom.
How They Did It
Goodale’s students worked in partner-teams, and were given 10 different graphs depicting relative speeds, and 10 different stories explaining them. The students had to figure out which graph went with which story. They were then assigned a graph-and-story combo to act out and, using Touchcast on iPads, one half of the pair filmed while the other acted.
Goodale blogged about how she put the speed graph lesson together here, where you can download a .pdf of the speed graph lesson plan and also find links to the students’ finished works.
Touchcast has created the EduCast channel and award specifically for educators to post Touchcasts they and their students create as part of a classroom curriculum. They’ve also released an exhaustive guide to ways the app can be integrated in education, with lesson plans arranged by content area, tips for getting started, and using iPads in groups.
A huge congratulations to Rachel Goodale and her 8th graders at PAML for being so willing to share their work!
I sat down this afternoon to brainstorm a list of video editing, creation and mashup apps that could be useful for educators. Above you’ll find the nine I came up with off the top of my head, all of which I’ve either used or seen used in the classroom. But I know I’m missing some.
Here are some sample lesson plans or how-to’s for each of the video apps above:
iMovie: Essex Middle School Edge students use it to make book trailers:
Touchcast: Peoples Academy Middle Level 8th graders made STEM-focused Touchcasts to illustrate distance over time:
“An alien named Athena lives on Mars, and goes to school. Athena’s house is a spaceship. When she left to go to school, she realized she left something about half way….”
ReelDirector: How about a video story of one classroom’s activities?
Explain Everything: Harwood Union Middle School students used Explain Everything to make short how-to videos for iMovie and Google Drive for their peers (bonus ourobouros points for hitting iMovie inside another video app)
“An alien named Athena lives on Mars, and goes to school. Athena’s house is a spaceship. When she left to go to school, she realized she left something about half way….”
We started out this year with a Physics Unit studying the relationships between time, distance, and speed. Students worked in partners and were given ten different speed graphs to analyze. They were also given ten different stories explaining the graphs.
Students were expected to focus in on features of the graphs such as the slope of the line indicating a faster or slower rate of speed (amount of distance in a given amount of time). They then had to match up the ten stories to the 10 graphs.
After the students completed the matching part of the project, they were assigned a single graph to analyze further. Partners were expected to take a picture of their assigned graph: this image was then inserted as a “V-App” into the TouchCast screen, present in one corner of the screen shot at all times. Now the student who was doing the filming/recording would be able to draw on the graph, explaining the different key features of the graph. The other partner would physically act out what is going on in the graph (running, walking, or stopping as indicated by the graph).
“Tom ran from his home to the bus stop and waited. He realized that he had missed the bus so he walked home.”
This technology allows students to capture motion in real time while simultaneously relating this real motion to the information encoded in the two-dimensional graph. If I could spend more time on this project, I would try to provide the students with more space to execute this task. However, in one hour class, I was able to receive TouchCasts from each of the partner pairs. I received a lot of positive feedback from students about this class, and am certain that some powerful learning connections were made!
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Rachel Goodale teaches 8th grade science at Peoples Academy Middle Level in Morrisville, VT. Visit her class website here. You can also browse the rest of her class’ distance/time Touchcasts by opening the app and searching on “Here’s How to Read a Speed Graph”.
Westville High School senior Bailey Bruner asks viewers for help choosing a major next year.
As a follow-up to our post on how teachers are using Touchcast, here’s an example of how students are using Touchcast from Westville High School in Oklahoma: to create interactive welcome videos! Touchcast is a free iOS app where users can create interactive videos including linked websites, live polls, images and other videos. You can view and share your videos on a channel on your iOS tablet, or online with a conventional web browser.
We’re sharing the screencasting love over here at the Institute, thanks in no small part to #btv librarian-rockstar Shannon Walters (@shannonwa), who introduced us to Touchcast. This free iOS app enables users to create videos for tablet and web that let you embed linked webpage images, polls, other videos (oh the meta!) and use a whiteboard, teleprompter, commenting and titles. It’s an interesting new entry into the iPad-based video-editing market.
And how are teachers using it? Here’s a Touchcast made by the principal of Roosevelt Elementary School, in California, welcoming students for the year:
Your viewers can vote in polls on-screen without interrupting the video.
And here’s Winooski art teacher and Tarrant partner educator Jessica Bruce, with What I Plan To Do With the Rest of My Summer (bonus points for recording while being distracted by cat):
Touchcast lets you embed short previews of webpages in your video, and viewers can click or tap through to visit them.
If you’re reading this entry on an iOS device, you can access both Touchcasts through the app and save them to your Bookmarks, or Recast them (like retweeting) to your channel. Any other teachers want to share how they’re using Touchcast?
Looking for ways to explore digital identity with students? Here are 4 student-centered, tech-rich digital identity exercises for working with students. As a bonus, all the exercises produce media that students can add to their digital portfolios. Let’s watch!
As the end of June nears and students take their final exams, clear out their lockers, and begin sleeping in until noon, teachers are gathering their remaining energy, and administrators are giving them space, to take stock of the year, celebrate the successes and challenges, and together learn from them.
It’s super-fun to make book trailers to embed in book covers with Aurasma, but how much cooler would it be to see your friend explain *in person* why they liked that book?
