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Today I had the privilege of listening to Hall Davidson, head of the Discovery Educator Network, speak on a topic entitled, “Revenge of the Digital Natives“.  He spoke of how the digital natives (children growing up with technology) have the ability to multi-task unlike any generation before them.  While the amount of time these students spend watching TV can increase their inability to attend, they can also multi-task with several different medias and expect to learn with several different medias. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Digital natives typically spend 2 seconds on a webpage before they decide whether or not the page will yield the information they are looking for.  What does this mean for teachers?  Think of the media you use in your class.  Mr. Davidson gave the example of how the old way to show an education video in schools was to play the whole 30 minute video.  Now with resources like United Streaming, teachers have the ability to download a short video segment that narrows in on their objective that they are teaching.  No more wasted classroom time! 

Mr. Davidson also shared some websites that can be used in a new way to engage students in the classroom:

• Google Lit Trips: Virtual field trips in Google Earth around famous works of literature
• Google Sketchup: Construct a 3D building
• Gcast: Call an online service, leave a message, and turn it into a podcast automatically
• Polleverywhere: Participate in a survey via your cell phone and results are displayed on the website live
• Jott: send yourself reminders via email by calling the Jott.com number

I have seen Mr. Davidson speak at the Day of Discovery in Silver Springs, MD back in August, and still find that he has new ideas to share with his audience.  I hope to continue to be as motivated and excited about technology as he is!

RELATED POSTS:

MD, VA, DC Day of Discovery

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Virtual worlds like Second Life have exploded with the rise of the Internet. Interacting in a virtual world means you need to have an avatar, a virtual representation of YOU.  But how many people actually make their “virtual” selves look similar to their real selves?  I dare you to compare! 

Hair down, hair up.  Let’s look at the avatars now.

This is my avatar from a manga avatar maker. (see above)

Here is my South Park avatar. (see above)

Try as I might, it was impossible to look good as a Simpson’s avatar. (see above)

And finally, my avatar in Second Life.  (see above)

Given the chance, would you try to improve on your real self or try to make your avatar really look like you?  One person on Second Life who tries to make his avatar look like himself is David Warlick. 

What would YOU do?

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On Wednesday, August 13 I traveled to Silver Spring, MD for “The Day of Discovery” at the Discovery Communications Headquarters. In addition to breakfast, lunch, and wonderful door prizes, we were treated to two keynote sessions and three break out sessions that taught us how to incorporate “Discovery Streaming,” a paid subscription to a site that is packed with educational multimedia for teachers to use.

Scott Kinney presented on “The Media Evolution”.  He supported the idea that media should be incorportated into the classroom as an instructional aid since 8-18 year old children spend 6 1/2 hours a day with media of some kind. Many teachers do not realize all of the skills that are needed to create media for school projects: researching, locate and gather resources, prewriting, writing, editing, storyboarding, and reading fluency skills.

Hall Davidson, Director of the Discovery Educator Network, presented on “Digital Media with Students in the Classroom.”  He discussed scaffolding the use of digital media in student projects until students are comfortable with the skills.  For example,

1. Begin with creating PowerPoint presentations and embed videos from Discovery Streaming.
2. Create slideshows from your digital images in Photo Story.
3. Create videos and movies with narration in Movie Maker.
4. Finally, create movies in Adobe Premier Elements and introduce chromakey skills to the kids.

In addition, Mr. Davidson told us about Kitzu, a website of resources for digital media for student projects and Jakesonline, a site of wonderful tutorials to get you started.

Matt Monjan presented “50 Ways to Integrate DE Streaming”.  While most of this was a review since I saw matt speak a few times before, I still learned a few new tricks.  For example, I discovered that you can now insert embeddable code, or widgets, into DS’s writing prompts and you can add more than one image.  Also, if you search “AFI” in Discovery Streaming, you will find several film making video resources to use with your students.

Hall Davidson also presented on “Teaching with Cell Phones”.  I spent most of the time on my phone so I forgot to write most of it down. However, I learned that you can podcast directly from your cellphone using Gcast.com.  You can also upload video directly into YouTube from your cell phone.  And did you know that you can take a poll from your phone using text massaging and see the results live on polleverywhere.com?   I tried this out – SO COOL.  Or try this one – if you send a text message that includes a fast food restaurant and a menu item to 34381 you will receive a message with all of the nutritional information about that food item.  For example, text “McDonald’s Big Mac” to 34381, it will tell you how many grams of fat you are about to enjoy.

Dennis Swain presented “Embedding Multimedia: PowerPoint Presentations that Pop!”  While I knew that we cuold embed videos and hyperlink to videos, I didn’t realize you could embed videos and still have all of the controls of Windows Media Player available (play, rewind, fast forward, etc).  To do this, open PowerPoint and go to a slide.

1. Click the “View” button on the top toolbar.
2. Click “Toobars” and “Control Tool Box”.
3. Click on the “hammer” button.
4. Scroll to “Windows Media Player” and select it.
5. Crosshairs will appear.  Draw a box on the slide where you want the video to appear.
6. Right-click the box.  Choose “properties”.
7. Click on the three dots on the box. (…)
8. Browse to where your downloaded movie is on your computer.  Select it.
9. Under “playback options”, uncheck “auto start” and check “stretch to fit.”
10. Click OK.

Now you will see the embedded video with the Media Player controls. While the video is playing, you can right-click the video and choose “Zoom” and “Full screen”.  Ta-Dah!

Thank you, Discovery Education!

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Okay – I know I feature a lot of websites, but maybe it’s because I know how hard it is to get software approved for classroom use in the schools today. I came across this website called “Build Your Wild Self” put out by New York Zoos and Aquariums. The site starts you will a human boy or girl template, and allows you to change different parts of your body to animal parts. Why would you want to do this? Besides being fun for children and adults, teachers can incorporate this into their classroom for creative writing or science. Just think: Let students create themselves as an animal, print it out, and then write about it. Students can explain how their new animal body parts allow them to survive in the chosen habitat. Or how about different writing topics to go along with this such as:

• Explain how your life would be different if you came home from school looking like this.
• What sports or activties would you be good at now that you are part animal?
• Research the different animals that you picked and why you would want to be like that animal.

Another great site is Switch Zoo. This site used to be entirely free, but over the last year or so they started packaging the “game” for sale on CD. I have to admit, this is one of my biggest pet peeves as a teacher. You find a great, free site to use with your class, and as soon as you make it part of your routine, the site becomes a paid site. Anyway, some features of this site are still free (just enough to hook you). I had my class create a new animal, print it out in color, and then build a habitat out of clay to match their new animal. Have your class:

1. Create a name for the new animal
2. Create a habitat
3. Explain how the animal adapts to survive in the habitat
4. Explain what the animal eats, how it gets food, and how it protects itself.
5. Write a creative story about the new animal:
   1. “My New Pet”
   2. “A Strange Day at the Zoo”

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Many teachers struggle to find images that they are allowed to use without running into copyright trouble.  Here are a few sites that I found over the past few months:

Discovery Education Clip Art (Be sure to look at copyright. You can download about 10 of these images)

Pics4Learning (Copyright friendly for teachers and students)

Clip Art for Educators

USA.Gov (read the disclaimer at the top of the page)

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[rockyou id=67571467&w=426&h=320]

You can easily upload slideshows onto your Wordpress blog. Several wesbites will allow you to upload and create slideshows online, and use the ID code to import into your blog or website.  I used RockYou for the slideshow above, but sites such as Slide.com and Slideshare will do the same thing with slightly different features.  I uploaded this slideshow by copying and pasting the ID number into the text of my blog.  RockYou has a feature to import automatically into Wordpress from their site, but it didn’t work for me.  I didn’t want to waste time trying to fix the problem when I knew copying the ID number directly into my blog would work.

Why would slideshows be helpful to use on your site?

• Scroll through field trip pictures
• Create a slideshow to play classroom reminders on your site
• Review information for a test
• Show a science experiement

Slideshows are easy to create an engaging for students to find on a classroom blog or website.

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U]

In an earlier post, I wrote about the impact of Karl Fisch’s video “Did You Know?” (a.k.a. Shift Happens 2.0).  You can also check out his blog while you’re at it.  He updates the video with current statistics such as “there are 2.7 billion searches on Google every month,” and the “amount of technical terminology is doubling every 2 years; and by 2010 it is expected to double every 72 hours.” 

Think:  What are the implications for teaching students in this fast-paced, digital world?  Do we have the resources, the money, the training, and the motivation to keep up?

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Digital storytelling is a powerful tool to motivate reluctant writers in the classroom.  Microsoft Photo Story 3 is a free download that works on Windows XP and Windows Vista and is incredibly easy to use. 

How can you use Photo Story to motivate writing in the classroom? Try these ideas:

1.  Write about a field trip using your digital pics from your destination

2.  Act out reader’s theater scripts or stories, take pictures, and have children write about the plot, conflict, solution, setting, or theme

3.  Visually show your classroom routine using Photo Story

4.  Visually emphasize new vocabulary

5.  Narrate the steps to a science project or math investigation

There is a visual tutorial of Photo Story for those who like to see what they are downloading before they commit to it.  I recommend it if you are one who doesn’t like to “play” around on software in order to figure it out.

Basically, there are 6 steps to creating a photo story.

1.  Open Photo Story and import your pictures using the icon.  Select multiple pictures in your folder by using the “shift” or “control” button.  Click “upload”.

2. You’ll see all of your uploaded photos on a filmstrip bar at the bottom of the screen.  Click and drag them to change their order in the story.  Click “next”.

3.  Add text to the pictures by clicking on an individual picture and adding text in the caption box.  By clicking on the “effect” button under the individual photo, you can add and effect such as “black and white”.  Click “next”.

4.  Add narration to your story.  Using a microphone, click “record” and speak your narration for each slide.  When you are done with each slide, click onto the next one and continue speaking.  Photo Story will automatically add timings to your photos based on how long you talk.  Clicking the “Customize Motion” button under each photo will allow you to choose transitions between photos.

5.  Add background music.  Choose your own music from your files or use music provided to you from the software.

6.  Save your story. 

That’s it!  By including a group of photos in a file folder on a shared drive in your school, you can have students access photos easily to create digital storytelling projects.  Try and let me know what you think!