Teaching & Learning

Elementary iPad

2011-06-03T17:03:00.003+10:00

Hope this little booklet is of use :)

Elementary iPad by Laura Wright is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital Storytelling with Keynote

2011-03-29T13:10:00.001+11:00

Quick post:

Keynote is the beautiful Apple answer to presentation software. Easy to use, interesting transition effects and animations within slides. This post is about a template I created for my MiL's year 1 class.

My son and I LOVE the interactive books you can get for the iPad. I wanted to give students the power to turn their stories into interesting, animated audio/visual books just like the ones on the iPad (or at least a simpler version). Keynote was the answer - the students already had access to the program and my MiL was familiar with the interface as she regularly uses Pages (the word processing program for Apple).

All images are "image placeholders" - to replace them with your own images just click, drag and drop! The formatting will then be applied to your image saving you time and effort.

Double click on the text boxes (remove "page text") and write in your story.

To record your story go to "Play" and down to "Record Slideshow". The slide show will go to full screen. Using the arrow keys click through your book as you read the story. The apple inbuilt mic will record your voice and synchronise your progress through the slides.

Export the file by going to "File" and then "Export". These are the settings that I saved our stories to:

The quicktime movies where then uploaded to the class wiki for comments and feedback from other students, teachers and parents in the school community. Provided students use a "screen name " you could even upload it to Youtube and share it with the world.

Here is the example we gave the students to spark their curiosity and make sure it worked :)

Download template here

Download Example here (in .MOV format)

Podcasting with Year 2

2010-10-26T12:33:00.003+11:00

During one of my classroom experiences I was given the amazing opportunity of teaching a project based unit on Endangered Animals. The project was to research, write and record a 30 - 50 second podcast about an endangered animal which would then be published on the class wiki. The project took approximately three weeks of 2 to 3 hours of class time per week. Before even planning the project I decided to make a mock podcast to show my supervising teacher as well as the class to gage their enthusiasm. Many of the class didn't know what a podcast was but seemed very excited by the prospect of having their work "online".

There were a number of steps that took varying lengths of time to complete in the production of the podcast. Here is an overview of what we did;

1. Investigate Topic and Choose Subject

For the first lesson in the computer rooms we simply spent some time looking through an American website on wildlife conservation - Defenders.org This website has fact sheets on many endangered and extinct animals from around the world. Students were directed to look through the website and choose which animal they wanted to investigate. I then recorded their choice on a classlist for future reference.

2. Research and Drafting Script.

Since the students were restricted to only one period a week in the computer rooms I decided to print the fact sheets. Each student received a copy of their chosen animal's fact sheet with a podcasting research worksheet attached. This was given to direct student research to specific questions which they were then to answer in point form. This written task was formally assessed for text comprehension and returned to students with feedback.

3. Final Script

With the teacher feedback, students filled in any information gaps and transferred their research from point form into an information text/script. As students finished, I marked their work a second time for grammar and sentence structure.

4. Recording Podcast

This was the most time consuming step in the production of our podcasts. So that the recording quality was optimal students individually came out of the classroom with me and recorded their script. Most students read out their script in one sentence at a time, practising fluency and pronunciation before each recording. I have to say that even though it took a long time, this step was such a special time with the children for me. Being able to spend 10 minutes on average with each student allowed me to get to know them better than I could of otherwise (they were a very special group of kids). As a final informal assessment I wrote a short comment on each student's fluency and confidence speaking.

5. Mixing and Publishing

With all the completed raw audio on my computer I spent a number of home hours over the last week tweaking volume and timing, then exporting the garageband files to Mp3 format. These Mp3 where then individually uploaded onto the school server and published on the class wiki.

You can see a copy of the writing assessment rubric and main worksheet below, both referred to in step three. To hear a sample podcast (posted with the student's parents permission) click on the worksheet page, it shall go to full screen and start the audio file.

Since completing this classroom experience and project I found a great series of posts on Silvia Tolisano's Langwitches Blog. Silvia has written a few posts about her podcasting adventures with elementary students.

If you have any further suggestions, comments, feedback or wish to share our own experience podcasting, just write a comment or send me an email: laurawright(dot)edu(at)gmail(dot)com