Brainstorm with Edistorm!

The grade one's have become researchers in the last couple of weeks. During our science unit about the needs of living things, the students have decided to find out more about ocean animals. This inspiration came from the Betas that live on their tables that they care for each week. There are 4 research groups and they are studying Dolphins, Whales, sharks and Turtles. To this point, we have been spending most of our time on chart paper, clipboards and stickies but groups have begun to meet with me at the Smart Board to create KWL charts based on their knowledge, questions and learning.

The way we have been organizing and manipulating our thinking and learning has been through a site called Edistorm. Edistorm is a brainstorming site that is a similar to Smart Ideas concept mapping, that allows you to place post its of different colours onto an interactive wall. You can group ideas and can even collaborate with others on your "storm" online. Just like stickies, you can move them around based on how your thinking and ideas change over time. I really like the youtube video tutorial at the site that gives you an overview of the functionality of this site and its possible uses. When you begin a storm you can start from scratch or you can choose from a small menu of templates. I became a member of the site and there is an option to join as an educator. I am currently on a 30 day free trial for private storms. They have special pricing for schools and the upgraded packages are reasonably priced.

Overall, I think that this site could be a useful tool for junior, intermediate or senior students to be able to work on independently. For primary students, it is a great demonstration tool in another medium to show how to brainstorm. I have just become familiar with it and would like to spend a lot more time playing with it to determine its full capabilities and possibilities.

Here is a link to my progressing Dolphin group's K-W-L. My plan is to post them to the blog as we near the end of our study.

Get your voice heard!

To hear about Vocaroo, click here...



I haven't tried to use Vocaroo to add voice clips into programs such as Movie Maker. If you do, share with me how it goes. Personally, I find it to be more user friendly as a voice recorder than some other voice recording tools for this purpose. I recently used it to embed my student's voices onto their blog pages. The task was to write about their Halloween costumes and then they practiced practiced practiced and then read into Vocaroo. It was a quick and easy way to add a personal touch to their work and to share it with a wider audience. Here is a link to one of my student pages and his creative vocaroo!
http://www.classblogmeister.com/blog.php?user_id=304884&blogger_id=323380

It is a great tool! Give it a try - in fact follow this link to Vocaroo and try it for yourself right now!

Showcasing Student's Work and Thinking Through Media Part 2

For the last couple of weeks, the Cardinal Ones and I were looking for a way to share our learning about Reading Strategies with our parents. We had a Reading Workshop in early October and were able to share Reading Strategies with about one third of the parents in our class but we still really wanted to reach everyone. We decided that our blog and Animoto would be a great way to share with everyone!
Animoto is an award winning that you can use to create captivating showcases of your student's ideas and work. It has a three step process for creating your projects.
Step 1: Load your images or video clips. In this step you can also add text where you would like it in your presentation.
Step 2: Choose your music. There is a VERY wide selection of music to choose from or you can load in your own music. One thing I do not like here, is that the music can only be MP3 format. I have made the mistake of purchasing songs from itunes for my presentations only to discover that I could not load them in because they were not MP3. If anyone has a solution to this, please let me know!
Step 3: Choose your format. With a basic membership, you can create 30 second videos for free or you can upgrade to full length for $3.00 per selection. You have a limited amount of choice but the choices are appealing. If you purchase an All Access membership for $30.00 per year, you have more choice in format and you can create full length movies. The Pro membership is more for businesses and is $249.00 a year but with many more options and capabilities.

At last, click "create" your video and Animoto mixes and puts it together into a polished piece. When complete you can view it and then edit or remix it if you are not satisfied with the result.
I like Animoto because the videos are less like a scrapbook than some other sites. What I don't like is that if I am not satisfied with the final product, I don't have the power to tweak it to my satisfaction because the site takes it away and does the creating. I have to wait for the site to give it to me again and then see if I am now satisfied. If not, the process begins again.

Once completed, you can embed it on your site, burn it to a DVD, email it or download it to share with others. I have used this site to create a few different presentations and would recommend it to others.
Check out our newly released Reading Strategies presentation below. It will also be posted to our Cardinal Ones blog to share.

Showcasing Student's Work and Thinking Through Media Part 1

One of the reasons (I think I talked about another in my initial post about Class Blogmeister) I created the Cardinal Ones Blog site was so that it could be a window into our classroom. I wanted the families to be able to see the ways and types of learning that their child participates in on a daily basis in our classroom. My hope is that it will create an understanding of their child's education in Grade One and that it would also create a partnership where we are both trying to support their child in their learning. One of the tools I use to create these "windows" is Smilebox. Smilebox is a free webservice that allows users to creatively slideshows, greeting cards and scrapbooks online and easily embed, email, print or burn them to be shared with others. You can easily add your own videos, photos or music by following the instructions. It is FREE for basic services but you can pay as you go for $3.99 to access premium options or you can buy a year membership for $39.99. After creating a few Smileboxes last year at $3.99 each, I finally bought the year membership because I was using it all the time and wanted to also use it personally.

The quality is professional and the reaction from viewers is always very positive. My students enjoy participating in the selection of the format from the 100's available. You can search by format or theme making it convenient to select your type. I also receive weekly emails from Smilebox, letting me know about the newest designs and formats.

I like Smilebox because it is very easy to navigate and you can create a piece very quickly and then embed it onto your blog within minutes of it's completion. One thing that has tripped me up a few times is that when I try to load video clips, they sometimes won't load and that causes an error that shuts the entire program down. I wish it regularly saved my work so that when that happens, I am not starting from scratch.

Overall, it is one of my "go-to" programs for publishing work on our blog and I would recommend it to others. You can check out a Smilebox by visiting our blog or clicking below. This Smilebox was created last year by my students and a high school co-op student! It was about conserving energy.

A free picture slideshow by Smilebox

I am thankful ... for Wordle and Tagxedo

This week, in our class discussions about Thanksgiving, the Grade One's came up with lists of the many many many people and things they were thankful for. In an effort to capture their ideas in a visually appealing format, we decided to create Word Clouds to be able to share their thinking with their ever growing readership on our blog. As an educator, I think that word clouds can be used in many curricular areas to display your student's thinking. You can use them for character descriptions in literacy, poetry, an "All about Me", as a brainstorming tool or for synthesis of big ideas in science, social studies, numeracy. The list can go on and on and there are many examples on the internet. I am going to share with you 2 sites that I have found useful to develop visually appealing word clouds with your students on a range of topics.

Wordle is a user friendly word cloud site that easily allows you to convert text to art. Simply click on "Create" and a text box appears for you to start typing your ideas. Leave a space between each word and when you are finished, click "Go" and taa daa, you have a word cloud. If you don't like the colour scheme or layout, click randomize repeatedly until you find a shape or layout you like. Then, save it to the public gallery. You can save it anonymously but you must save it in order to have options for what you would like to do with it. After saving it, you can print it or paste an embed code to another place for display such as a blog or homepage. See my example below or you can also visit my class' blog to see the student's Thanksgiving Wordles at the Cardinal's Nest.

Tagxedo is another word cloud site that gives you choice in the style of the clouds. For free, you can choose from 50 cloud styles such as a star, heart, speech bubble, Christmas tree etc... plus for a limited time, you can upload images from your computer to use. This is currently free but these premium or custom options will come with a membership soon.

I like this site because of the versatility. You can customize your word cloud's colour scheme, shape, font, orientation, layout, theme and orientation by using the toolbar to the left of your image. This gives you more control of your word art. Also, when you scroll over your word cloud, you can highlight or emphasize the words you would like. To see the full possibilities of Tagxedo, you MUST check out the Gallery to see what other people have created. There are many options for saving your word cloud: jpeg; png; imgur;html cloud; player or web. The embed code is using silverlight (a web application framework similar to adobe flash) which would require a download to be widely viewed.

Please see my attempt at a self portrait below:

"Me" and "Me in Tagxedo"

I think that these two sites have many applications for students in many curricular areas. I hope that as you try them out, you will share your discoveries and successes by commenting below. Have fun!

Oh September!

It is the first month of school and my 5 and 6 year old students posted their first blogs today (09/20). We are using the site classblogmeister.com and I thought that I would share with you some information about the site and my thoughts and opinion about it.

Classblogmeister is a free site for Educators that was created and developed by David Warlick, an Educator who operates the Landmark Project, which is a consulting and innovations firm in the USA . His passion for literacy and education is what drove him to create this site for educators.

It is a very secure site that allows the teacher to moderate and approve all posts as well as comments. It is fairly easy to navigate and within a framework allows you to personalize the page by choosing colours and adding pictures, clip art, widgets and other media.

I began using it last February after taking part one of the I.T. course. In my internet travels, I had come across the blog site of Kathy Cassidy and was (and still am) amazed by what her grade one students were doing in Saskatchewan. http://classblogmeister.com/blog.phpblogger_id=1337 What really amazed me about Kathy's site was the readership. She has 89 countries on her "clustrmap" and has had 109866 hits since 2006. It inspired me to think that my grade one students could put their message out to the world and get responses! Wow - how powerful! Nothing can motivate a beginning writer more than to see the number of reads on your blog and to receive comments to your work - and from more than your teacher.

Classblogmeister is a very secure site that allows the teacher to moderate and approve all posts as well as comments. It is fairly easy to navigate and within a framework allows you to personalize the page by choosing colours, adding pictures, clip art, widgets and other media. Initially, you must get a school number from David Warlick through email to set up your blog but once you have that, you can work at creating your site. There is a pdf that contains tips and tricks for creating and maintaining your blog and you can also get technical support through a forum on the site. Personally, I found the pdf and tips somewhat helpful but really, it came down to playing with it myself and just figuring things out.

Last Saturday night about 10:30pm, I posted a couple of videos on the site and when I got up in the morning, there had already been 83 views! By Monday morning we were at about 150 and tonight as I write this there have been 534! We even have a few comments. The kids are burning with excitement and enthusiasm and want to blog on their pages. Right now, I feel my hopes for my emerging writers beginning to bloom. Through this web 2.0 tool, I can see the current skill level of my students and plan for future lessons based on this evidence. What a fabulous artifact (one of many forms, of course) of their writing growth that this will be as the year progresses - and one that their parents can view at any time and anywhere. What a wonderful living portfolio and a means to communicate to parents about what happens in "The Cardinal's Nest".

If you'd like to check out our blog, please click the link to The Cardinal's Nest

T.B.