My Favorite (Free!) Video Tools

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I love using video with my second graders and they love to watch themselves. Videos are always a hit with parents and an easy way to help students reflect on and remember content/concepts.
I want to highlight two of my favorite FREE webtools for video. You probably can see examples of both of these on my blog already.
The first is Animoto. It is free for educators, although you do have to reapply for an account every 6 or 12 months. You can also set up accounts for your students.
Animoto is so easy to use. You simply upload your pictures or video clips. Arrange them in the order you want them to appear. Choose or upload music. I love that the music is already available on the site. This way I know it is legal to use and I won’t be breaking any copyright laws. You can also upload your own music. This was nice when I had the children sing and used this as the music for the video. They also added some background themes for the Holidays. Animoto will provide a link or embed code to share your movie, or videos can be downloaded to your computer. Here is a Holiday Animoto created using pictures of my students sharing a Christmas art project.

The second video tool I want to share is Smilebox. Smilebox creates slideshows with your pictures or video clips. They have many design choices with a variety of themes. They also have music on the site or you can upload your own. Smilebox is easy to use and is another fun way to share classroom activities or concepts. Smilebox will provide you with a link, embed code or allow you to burn your video to a DVD. Here is a simple Smilebox sharing the Gingerbread Houses the second graders created using an Excel Template and inserting Clip art. (This project was taken from the Winter Wonderland Wiki.)

Click to play this Smilebox slideshow:
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Stop Motion Video with iMovie 09

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Earlier in the fall my second graders took the I.O.W.A. test. It is not the most exciting week for me as I do not get much opportunity to teach. As the children were taking the test and I was walking around reading the questions (a good portion of the 2nd graders test is teacher dictated) I decided to take some pictures. I set a digital camera near me and just kept clicking. I would move it as I moved around the room. The kids are very used to cameras in the room and didn’t pay any attention to it.

In the past I have used FRAMES from tech4learning to create stop motion movies, but I don’t have FRAMES on my Mac. I decided to see what I could do with iMovie. I did an internet search to see if I could find some info and I found exactly the tips I needed to get it to work.

Step One – Import your photos into iPhoto (this automatically makes them available to iMovie)
Step Two – Open iMovie, Start a New project, No theme, Highlight and add all of your pictures. It helps if they are already in the correct order. If not put them in the correct order in your Project.
Step Three – set the Clip Adjustments time to 0.2 or 0.3 seconds. Check the Applies to all stills.
Step Four – You need to get rid of the picture transition. Click on the Ken Burns editing on the first picture. You will see a green and red square. Line these up so they are on top of each other. This stops the picture from transitioning.
Step Five – Highlight the picture you just edited. (Yellow circle will be around it) Go to the top toolbar menu – Edit, Copy
Step – Six Highlight all of the other pictures in your movie. You can highlight one, and hold the shift key to highlight the rest. Go to Edit – then Paste Adjustments. This will remove the transition effect from all pictures.
Now play your video and it should be stop motion animation.

Here is my Stop Motion Testing Video made in iMovie.

2nd Graders Enter Video Contest!

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This entry is cross posted on www.maculspace.ning.com and www.harju.edublogs.org

The second graders entered the Interwrite Classroom Makeover Contest.
The prize is a $30,000 classroom makeover AND a CAKE big enough for the
entire school!

You can view our entry by following this link. You can rate it (5 stars
please) and leave a comment. Voting will occur only for the top 5 in
each grade level after November 17. Enjoy!


http://eimakeover09.shycast.com/submission/show/276/

Talking Tech!

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I love talking tech! I was lucky enough to share my love of tech at the M-A-N-S Conference in Detroit, Michigan last week. (Michigan Association of Non-Pubic Schools) I shared my favorite Web 2.0 applications and how I use Wikis and Blogs with my second graders. It was great to see teachers get that look in their eye when they realize the power that technology has to transform their teaching and the students’ learning. Here is a copy of the Power Point I used for the presentation.

Our First Science Video This Year

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We just finished learning about Landforms so I thought before assessing the kids, we would film a video for our review. I had great success with this last spring when we made our Michigan Video. The kids choose which landform or body of water they wanted to talk about. The kids were much more camera shy than I thought they would be. I kept their lines short and simple. It is always fun to watch them goof their lines due to nerves.
Following the Video is my first Smilebox slideshow showing the children presenting their reports on Landforms and Bodies of Water. Most children created posters, a few created theirs on their wiki page, and one did a power point presentation. They enjoyed standing in front of the class either at the SMART Board or at the Document Camera to present it. Enjoy.
These videos are also cross posted on my classroom blog, www.harju.edublogs.org.



Click to play this Smilebox slideshow: Sharing Our Reports
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Geocaching – Fun!

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Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS device can then try to locate the geocache. from www.geocaching.com.
I joined www.geocaching.com earlier this summer. I also borrowed a handheld GPS from a friend (thanks Ron!) On a few family car trips we played with it, learning how it worked. I then went on www.geocaching.com and found some local caches and programmed them into the GPS. Today my daughter and I decided to try to find our first cache.

I started with the Reed’s Lake II Cache. Since I programmed it in awhile ago, we just hopped in the car and set off. Reed’s Lake is less than a mile away, so we figured it would be pretty easy. We were able to get within 0.1 of a mile of it using the GPS, but were met with a woody area and we were wearing the wrong shoes, shorts and did not have any bug spray. We decided to go back home, change our clothes, get a map of the area and look online for more information. When we looked online we found out that we will need a boat (kayak or small canoe) to reach this cache. We still want to find it, but a getting a boat takes a bit more planning. We did enjoy our time in the woody area – My daughter was thrilled to see a snake and a frog. The frog was fine, I will not say I was thrilled about the snake.

We choose to look for another local cache – Snow Leopard. It is also close to home and I was familiar with the area – and no boats needed. The coordinates were programmed into the GPS, we read the online hint, and then set off. My daughter (11) was in charge of reading the GPS and led us successfully to the area. We did need to drive around the block until we found the public access point, but find it we did. We needed to walk a bit, but again my daughter was great at following the GPS and led us right to the cache. It was as they say a traditional cache – contained in a lock box. We opened the box, looked at the stuff and wrote our names in the log. We didn’t take anything or leave anything in the box. We will think about this for future caches and bring or make something to leave.

We were feeling lucky and decided to follow a set of coordinates that were programmed into the GPS for another nearby cache, Leopard’s Spots. We drove in practically a straight line from our location. We ended up at a corner wooded lot, a bit overgrown. We got out and walked around. We knew we were close, the GPS said we were within 6 feet at one point, but we didn’t see it. The terrain was woodsy and very steep. It was littered with bottles, and other trash and we almost tripped a couple times. I didn’t want to just sift through the area without a bit more information, no telling what we might find. When we got back home we looked at the hint and were ready to try again. After reading the hint we had a better idea where to look, and it only took us about 10 minutes to locate it. Again it was a traditional cache box. We signed the log and looked at the things that others have left in the box.

Finding two of the three caches today was a great experience. My daughter is eager to look for more with me. We also talked about ways to use this with my second graders and talked about where we might like to hide a cache. This was a successful and fun first time caching experience and a great mother-daughter day as well!

Glogster in 2nd Grade

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I was excited when I heard that Glogster had an education edition. I immediately signed up my class. When Glogster sent the passwords, which were a series of letters and numbers, I knew these needed to be changed. My initial thought was I’ll teach the kids. They can do it! With enough time and some small group work it could have been done, however we did not have that much time (and I was excited to get the kids going) so I changed the passwords myself. I will teach them that lesson another day.
Before we entered the lab for the children’s first time on Glogster, I showed it to them in the classroom on the big screen. I have a class of 2/3 boys who are very chatty, wiggly and easily distracted (as all 2nd graders are.) The lesson was during the last hour of the day, not usually a time that they are most attentive. I realized as I was demonstrating Glogster, they were SILENT! How many times are your students SILENT when you are explaining or demonstrating a new concept? I am usually interrupted a few times, and need to give at least a couple “looks.” But not this time. Their eyes were glued to the screen and they were taking it all in. Wow!

In the Lab everyone got right to work and loved playing with Glogster. They had an assignment to complete. Each child had written a short poem about Spring. These were edited and ready for the kids to turn into a Glogster page. I made it a rule that as these were spring poems, I did not want any of the skulls or crawling cockroaches on their glog. This was a personal preference, but I also know my boys, and if one can do it, the rest will do it and I just didn’t want to go there. They created some wonderful glogs. I also showed them how to add sound. Using our beautiful new Macs with the integrated Webcam and microphone, the children were able to do it all themselves sitting at their computer. We have filmed children reading in the room and they knew what to do when they hear “Quiet on the Set!” They were very cooperative! I was amazed at how quickly the children figured it out, and they were great at helping their neighbors. This meant I did not hear my name called as many times as usual and that everyone was able to use our lab time productively. We had a second lab session that week, and many of the children finished the spring glog, so I showed them how to embed it on a new wiki page. Again they picked it up quickly! You can see the finished glogs on the Spring Glogs page of our wiki.

Video, Green Screen, Skype and Our State

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Every May we celebrate Michigan Week. In the past we would talk about fun state facts, color the state symbols, and add cities and names of the lakes to a map. It was a fun week, but I was never sure how much of what we learned stayed with them.

This year I found a request for a Michigan School in the http://50statesproject.wikispaces.com/ I volunteered my second graders right away – even though I didn’t know what was expected and nor had I ever Skpye chatted with another school before.
We prepared at least 10 facts about our state and the children practiced reading them. We did a practice Skype with the school in Alabama the day before to make sure the connection worked (it did!) The following day we went to the computer lab (we have new iMacs and iSight cameras) and gathered around the camera/computer. The children did a great job reading their facts and listening to the Alabama school tell us their facts. I did learn a few things I will do differently the next time (and we will do it again!) We used an external iSight camera instead of the one on the iMac and we ended up a bit sideways. I also would have the children arranged differently. But all in all it was a great experience. Here is the link to our Skype chat. (The volume on our end is louder than theirs. Also the next time I will talk less!)


As it was Michigan week, and I had been given a Video/Green Screen assignment from my PLC group, I decided we would take our facts and illustrate them in front of the camera using the green screen (I needed at least 4 of the screens hanging behind the kids and on the ground so they could appear to be walking on the bridge.) We have done many green screen videos before so the kids were thrilled to do it. Each group would stand with their fact and we would decide the best way to show it. They pointed to the green screen imagining a map behind them, picked cherries from the green wall, swam with brook trout, and walked across the bridge. As it took a few takes to film each scene (and the rest of the class was quietly reading around the room at the time) we heard each fact repeated many times. The value of this is that the children can recite most of the facts from the video with little prompting. We have watched the video over and over and they repeat the lines along with the speakers. Yesterday we were playing a game, and the question asked if Lake Erie was one of the Great Lakes. We all laughed and repeated the lines from the video – naming all of the great lakes! ( We do know how to pronounce Ontario – even though the gals in the video kept saying Ontari-er!)

The movie was a great creative exercise. The children had many great ideas and their ideas made the video better. We covered a bookshelf in green screen and David climbed on that as if he were climbing a tree (his idea!) It is an experience I will repeat. This video will be shown to future classes as an introduction to Michigan Week. We already showed the video at our All School Student Film Festival. Video will be used in other content areas as well. I am already jotting down ideas for next year.

Wow Moment- The Power of Classroom Tech

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Last week I had one of those “Wow” moments and once again realized the Power of Using Tech in the Classroom.
Here’s the set up: (This shows all of the reasons why the children should NOT have been engaged during our afternoon lesson.)
Wednesday was 3rd graders “Business Day”. The children were very excited from the moment they stepped into the classroom, this event is a highlight of the year. The hallway (right outside our 2nd grade classroom) fills up all morning with 3rd graders setting up their wares to sell – from pizza, to small toys, to cookies, to smoothies. The 2nd graders did shop before lunch and consume way too much sugar. After lunch we had a longer recess (as business day was still going on outside our classroom.) We returned to the room and did some reading (My attempt to calm them.) Then unifix cubes were passed out to all students. We haven’t used them a lot lately so they were a “new” toy to play with. They had used them briefly the day before, but we did not have much free explore time.

Here’s the lesson:

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I set up the SMARTboard with 3 large rectangles and a couple of object options. I asked a student, Katie to come up to the board and show us how to multiply 3 times 3. As Katie made her way to the SMARTboard, I said, “Why don’t we film it and we can add it to our Mathcasts?” It took a minute to set up the camera. When the children saw I was ready and Katie was about to begin, they QUIETED RIGHT DOWN. The room was SILENT! I had not given any directions as to use of unifx cubes during Katie’s demonstration, however I did not hear one child playing with unifix cubes. Katie stated the problem, and began to drag apples into the rectangles. EVERY EYE WAS ON HER and all were QUIET. It was amazing! Not just amazing that they were quiet, but that they were pin-drop quiet on an exciting day, near the end of the school year, in a class that was not known for being pin-drop quiet, or even somewhat quiet. I just sat back in wonder. What had so engaged them? It wasn’t me – I wasn’t talking or doing anything. They were watching a classmate use the SMARTboard and they knew it was being filmed. It was the tech that grabbed them and the tech that kept them engaged. They will also watch this Mathcast, and the others we filmed over and over – reinforcing the idea and making connections. It was just so amazing. Wow.

Now Playing…Wacky Weather Videos

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You can see the rest of the videos by visiting our class wiki.