Recording Audiobooks as part of a guided reading lesson

I was working with a wonderful young teacher at Willowbank school last week. She was recording the children's voices in Garageband while they read their book Aunty Mo's Kids by Jill Eggleton. They had recorded reading it in theatre style. Now they were adding sounds to it. While they were working together I came to a realisation and said to the teacher "Do you know what you are doing here? You have moved from the traditional teacher and students sitting on the mat guided reading lesson to the student centred, teacher facilitated using technology guided reading collaboration."
This teacher had been using all the 'Guided Reading' steps of responding to and discussing text
while the students were in front of the computer, reading their books, searching for words and sentences in context, recording voices and sounds, learning computer skills, collaborating together and creating an audiobook that they will be able to use in their classroom as an extra activity (with iPods) and share with other classes.
As I said to her, "this is another way of teaching and engaging children in learning, that you do not have to teach always in the traditional style. Your activity could also become your teaching time with the children."


As teachers we have to be brave and let go or adjust some of our traditional delivery methods to incorporate the use of technologies such as computers, cameras, iPods, IWB's, game consoles, or Flip videos. The children will be engaged, on task and learning, you as the teacher will see different aspects of your children as they become more animated and in control of their learning.

Xtranormal Text to Movie - Publishing tool

I came across this method of presenting while viewing 21st Century Classroom. (an excellent presentation by a teacher who has dramatically changed her teaching style).
This movie had been made with Xtranormal.
You will need to sign up to an account to get started.
Choose your characters, your set, background music and voice. (Unfortunately there was no 'Kiwi voice' so I had to choose Australian female)
Then type (or copy/paste) your text into the 'Write the script' space.
Add more blocks to your movie and add more script. You can then drag camera angles, sounds into the script. You can change expressions and body poses.
Some uses for this application

• students can publish their writing
• present their research
  
• use as a practice for their speech writing
• teachers can use it post instructions for next topic
• teachers can use it to comment on student's work
  

The only down side was that there were a few dodgy characters wearing only fig leaves or underwear amongst the 80 characters to choose from. And there were a couple of actions/body poses that I would not be happy if children chose them. But that is when we should, as a class talk about what is appropriate in a classroom situation.
For the free account you have only 5 takes, so get it right early on! I discovered it is wise to create many blocks or your script voice would run into other sentences.
Otherwise this is a great way to share and present yours/or your student's work.

R rating - R13

Creating Comics in Word

I was working with a teacher today who said he was going to make comics in Word.

To make it look more like a comic, upload your photos to Befunky and cartoonise them. Click on Get Started, click on Cartooniser, click on Browse files, select a photo, click Open, rotate or crop if necessary, click OK and your photo will appear. Click Save, name your photo and click Save to My desktop, click OK you may be asked to Save again. You may want to crop the white border of the photo



I had previously already showed him how to insert Autoshapes onto a page, I usually insert six to a page. Then you click on a shape, go to the Fill can, choose Fill Effects, click on the Picture Tab, click on Choose Picture, select a photo and click Insert.












Once the pictures are inserted then you need to add the speech bubbles and narrative text boxes. This is a wonderful way of publishing children's writing.





You can also do the same thing in PowerPoint but put one photo on each slide and it becomes a Comic Slideshow.

ICT Kids

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Transformations in the 21st Century Digital Environment

This is a slideshow I presented at a recent ICT Cluster Conference. It is an overview of the eight days I spent in a Year 5/6 class.

Keynote Speech Presentation

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Audiobooks, Instructional Readers & Shared Books

There are lots of Audiobooks available for download online on iTunes, but rarely the one you want! Harry Potter books are available on the US iTunes site but not on our NZ iTunes (What's up with that?)
But if you have an iPod , a 5 way splitter
Belkin Rockstar
(NZ $20) and cheap headphones (NZ $2.99) then you can create absorbing reading activities for your students.

Record your voice in GarageBand (Mac) or Audacity (Win), upload to iTunes and download to your iPod.

Kids love the iPods and the headphones and this makes for a very 'q-u-i-e-t' activity!

More Ideas

1. Do you know somebody who has an interesting, expressive voice, ask them to read for you and record them
2. Record in theatre reading style where you have different voices reading the parts of the characters and narrator
3. Junior teachers ask teachers of Senior children to get their students to record some of your instructional readers or shared books
4. More able readers in the class can create audiobooks for less able students
5. Keep a box of the books/Journals/Instructional readers that you have recorded so that children can choose their favourite story to listen to

Or what about when you can't get to every reading group, record the questions you would normally ask as part of the recording. Students can pause the iPod to look up or find the answers.

Create a Library of recommended books

Library Thing is a great widget to add to your Blog or Wiki. I often get asked what books I have read that would be good for other people to read so I always refer people to my 'ICT Teaching & Learning' site that has the Library Thing widget down the side.
For your class wiki & blog create a library of books for students to read.
You do need to create an account to get started.

Click on Join now or Sign in. Click on Add Books. Type in the name of the book and click Search. It will search Amazon for all titles of that particular book. Click on the name of the book cover you like and it will be added to your Library. You can add a review or rate it by clicking on the Edit Book tab.
To add your Library to your blog or wiki, click on the Tools Tab, then click on Make a Standard Blog Widget. Make a choice of how you would like your book list to appear. Make a selection from the Preset, the Widget type, layouts etc. Edit the title then Copy the code from the right hand side and Paste into a HTML widget space in your blog or wiki.







Navigation space in Wikispaces


R rating R13

Intelliboard IWB

I worked on an 'Intelliboard' IWB today. The Intelliboard software is very basic with only some of the features we see in other IWBs but some of the things we expect like convert ink to text are not there. The basic manipulation of images is cumbersome. Instead of being able to select, resize and move in 3 movements, those changes triple. You need to click on the select button, then select the shape by clicking on it, then go and select another button to resize, go back and click on edge of the shape, then resize, go back and click on movement button, then click on the object and then click and drag...phewwww! Now if you even want to change the outline colour of a shape or fill it with colour, then you just know that is going to take many steps.
There were some features I liked in the software, the automatic recording for each page was good, and the Reveal feature was clean, but the Spotlight was messy and tricky to use and the clipart was limited and very few backgrounds and templates were available.
The board itself though worked fine with other software and the Internet.

The strongest feature of the board was the one click buttons on both sides of the board. You could move from page to page, stop any action you had performed, choose 3 different coloured annotation tools, highlight tool, reveal, spotlight and a screen clipping option. The most bizarre button was the Applause button, click it with the pen and you hear applause over the speakers. There was a button that opened up an Internet page, a button to open the board software 'Intelliboard Whiteboard' and a button to calibrate.

Overall Assessment
As an Interactive board it worked fine, the authoring software was the weakest part of it, the buttons down the side the best feature. I think this board is perfectly adequate for corporate use but schools demand authoring software that enable you to create your own activities with a variety of features. The Intelliboard software does not provide this.

Teaching Experience time 'Writing'

My management of 'writing time' has been the same for all of my teaching career. Every time I show teachers how I do it, they think it is a brand new idea, but teachers have been doing similar things for nearly 30 years. I was fortunate to have started my teaching life in a wonderful South Auckland School with an inspiring Principal and an incredible management team. Staff PD was taken by 'experts' on the staff and what I learned at those sessions have carried me through my life of teaching. In later schools I taught at I gained many more strategies that lead me to fine tune my teaching practice. The management procedures I am going to write about I have used with New Entrant to Intermediate, Decile One to ten children.
As I have said many times, Management is the key to successful, productive teaching and learning. Children should know at any one time what they should be doing 'now' and 'next'. I spend a lot of time in teachers' classes, and one of the things I see frequently is children coming up to the teacher saying 'I have finished this, what do I do next?' Here are some of the management strategies and the teaching processes I follow to stop this from happening.
I present the students with a slideshow about the writing genre. There are examples of drafting and publishing, the process is broken down in stages, and there are links to website games.
Step One:
Every day we look at the slideshow but we will concentrate on one aspect. I usually write a class drafting example at the same time, reworking and editing everyday.
Here is the Explanation example I used with these children

How to write Excellent Explanations

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Here is a link to a Recount Example.
Step Two:
Modelling of Writing. Here are some examples of how to do this.

• in the school where I was demonstrating I used an Inspiration framework that I have designed
• this framework is worked on everyday until it is ready to be published as a class presentation
  

other examples are

• Using a notebook page in an IWB or mimo, insert a lined page template and write an example to be edited

• use the coloured pen editing tools, highlighting and line tools for editing
• no IWB but have projector; then use Word/Pages, type in the story, editing as you go
• KidPix: use the pen tool to write the story, change the colours for editing purposes

Step Three:
The Self Managing Taskboard
I have used this taskboard since the early nineties. When we start a writing topic everybody begins at the drafting section. Students then move themselves from drafting to proofreading. They follow all of the proof reading steps ( read aloud, peer proof read etc). Move to Conferencing.













Step Four:
Drafting
I like to give students plenty of choices when drafting. This encourages some of the reluctant writers as there are some new and different ways of drafting.















Step Five
Conferencing

While waiting to conference with the teacher students can 'do' the Conferencing choices. These cater for student's different learning styles, interests and intelligences. It also means that they always have something to do while they are waiting for me to conference with them.Part of managing themselves students record their conferencing choices onto a tracking file






Step Six
Publishing
After the student has conferenced with me we discuss which would be the best way to publish their work. Once their work is published they then start a new draft and work through the cycle again. Here is a slideshow with some examples of ways to publish your writing.

Publishing Writing Ideas

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Finally here is the Individual Explanation Assessment.

Teaching Experience time 'Maths'

The next few blog posts are going to concentrate on single curriculum areas and how I developed the management and organisation of the teaching and learning time.

Maths was an interesting one, I decided I wanted to teach a particular strand rather than 'Number' so I chose Measurement concentrating on Perimeter, Area and Volume. I wanted the children to become self managing and responsible about their learning so the unit I developed revolved around this idea. You can see the unit by Ctrl clicking (or Command click) on this link. Several years ago I had previously developed a statistics unit where everyday I would start off with whole class teaching session of around 5-10 minutes where I would demonstrate how to create the different types of graphs (laptop connected to a TV set). Students would then work independently through the large number of tasks while I targeted the children who needed help. This worked really well! I had no projector or IWB at this time. So my new challenge was how could I use the mimio to its full potential. And that is when I came up with the idea of the workshops. I created three different workshops; Perimeter, Area and Volume. I designed them so that the students could run it themselves using the mimio.
The daily session would start off with the Class Activity (One slide per day, the example below shows an example of 3 days with answers). If students got any of the problems wrong on the page then they had to attend the Workshop. Students could also choose to be present at the workshop if they wished. I overheard some children saying that they wanted to go to the workshop even though they got the class activity all correct. On observation it was apparent that they enjoyed the collegial working atmosphere.

Class Activity

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At the very first Workshop on Perimeter, I lead for the first 5 minutes and then it was obvious that the children could take over themselves, I put one person in charge telling them to make sure that everybody has a turn recording using the mimio pen.

Perimeter workshop

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On page 8 of this slideshow is a link to the very excellent bbc.co.uk site on perimeter. This was a perfect activity for children to do collaboratively and individually as it gives them the answers and totals at the end. Without any prompting from me the students went back and redid the quizzes they got wrong!
While the students were working on the workshop I was able to move around the room talking to individuals or groups if they had created their own group. Sometimes you would find a group of 2 or 3 at the Wii. Quite often children would work in pairs, but there was also several that liked to work alone. It was interesting to note each day that most children liked to work in the same pattern, either in a social group or on their own. The same children also volunteered for the workshop (they liked playing teacher I think!)

Area Workshop

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Over half of the class were able to organise their time without my intervention, and most (particularly the girls) were able to keep up with the recording of what they were doing. A lot of the boys liked doing the fun stuff with computers, Wii, PSP and iTouch, so they needed a bit of a push in the direction of covering some of the book tasks.

Volume workshop

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This was a great way to teach as I was able to oversee the whole class and work with the students who needed it the most. There was a relaxed, calm feel about the class as everyone got on with what they needed to do. I think the students liked knowing what they were going to be doing as soon as they came into the room as they had done the planning and thinking about it.

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

All of the maths websites were bookmarked on the Class Delicious site and all of the computers, Wii, PSP and iPod Touch internet browsers opened to the Class Delicious page as a Home page. With the Workshops being so visible due to them being projected on the screen with the students using the mimio, I was able to keep an eye on what the students were doing and if they needed any help.

Create a Monet

Te Papa Museum in Wellington is showing 'Monet and the Impressionists' until 17 May 2009. At the moment (and I hope it continues) they are running a competition where you can upload your own photos and turn them into a Monet. You can email or IM them to others, embed in a blog or wiki or embed a link to the site. If you have screen capture software such as Jing or just plain Prt Scrn on Windows or Shift -Command- 4 on Mac then you can save a picture of your creation.

R rating: None

Unexpected Outcome - Music

When I was a full time teacher (my day job for the last 12 years has been working with teachers), music was a big part of my day. With guitar and ukulele I would travel. I would be that teacher leading the school or syndicate group assembly in song, or supporting the school 'Kapa Haka' group. I am responsible for introducing many generations of children to The Beatles, Chubby Checker, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater, The Beach Boys and many other classic bands. Back then I always found that music was important to children and they really enjoyed a sing-a-long. One of my most popular reading activity choices was our blown up music chart books where I had typed the songs and photocopied them up to A3 and made them into a book. Children would take those books outside with a metre ruler (for pointing) and sing their hearts out.


I haven't had the opportunity to sing like that with children for several years, and I did not build it into the two week teaching block I have just finished, but what did happen that I did not expect was how the students wanted to use the iPods. I knew they would be interested or curious especially if they haven't had much exposure to them before, but I was not prepared for their overwhelming interest in the music side of the iPod. They loved using them for the Audiobooks. The Belkin Rockstar 5 way splitter ($20) and headsets for $2.99 were a great addition to the reading programme. One group while they were working on their Stormbreaker activity listened to the Audiobook story on the iTouch (this was the students' choice as they had free reign over their decisions of what to do in Reading Choice time).


By the second day students were asking me if they could play music before school using the battery operated (or power) speaker system. So every morning they would set up the iPod touch on the speaker system and play music until the bell went, and then it was like automatic pilot, they would switch off the music and start their day's work.
On the third day I noticed one of the students had a particularly great singing voice, so I showed her the iKaraoke (NZ$110). We hooked it up to the speaker system and she was away, so every morning as well as the music we were serenaded by this young lady.




But one particular use I noticed that sneaked in was students listening to music while they worked. In this photo, the student has just removed the head set to talk to me but he had been working away quietly listening to music.

The most interesting factor I noticed were the type of children who voluntarily used the iPods for music were the most, for a better word, 'rambunctious' lot who had the loudest voices in the class and the 'ones' that you noticed the most in the class. But when they were listening to the iPods, there was a noticeable silence.
These students were on task, doing their work and not bothering anybody else. I had no problem with them listening to music as they worked as that is something I like to do.
It just goes to prove that old adage 'Music does soothe the savage beast [sic]!'