Tots and Technology

Do you live in Texas? Live near Texas? Just wish you were in Texas?

Well you should consider attending Tots and Technology presented by the Texas Computer Educators Association. Awesome little conference geared toward PK-5th grade teachers but middle school teachers (6-7-8) could benefit also. You get a lot of bang for your buck so you really need to check it out! And it's in Galveston...on a beach...

Let's Make a Movie!

My sixth grade students are working on a research project about composers. Each student researched one composer and wrote a brief summary about that composer including items about their life such as education, influences and compositions. They will each dress up as their composer and we are going to video them giving their talk as their composer. The cool thing though is that we are going to "blue screen" it and put images relating to the composer in the background. It has it's challenges but this is a project well worth the time. So I'd like to share some awesome resources that I and my students will be using to create these composer movies. I'll share one when we are finished. We are going to be using Windows Movie Maker 2.6 to edit our movie.

Let's start with some videos that will tell you all you need to know about how to do this.These come from Lamar CISD in Texas and their Interact Cafe. The videos are presented by Chris Nilsson. I first saw Chris present at TCEA. Chris includes on the site the XML files you will need to add to Movie Maker to use the blue screen. This is a great resource. While you are there, you should check out some of the other things on the Interact Cafe site. Some excellent tutorials.

To read their script, the students will be using a site called Cue Prompter It is exactly what it sounds like, easy to use and FREE.



We are using iPads to record. Online-convert (another of my favorites) to convert the videos to wmv so we can import them into Movie Maker.

And btw- my "blue screen" is a plastic party table cloth that I bought from the local party supply store. Works perfectly!

And yes, there are other tools to do what we are doing. And yes, there is an iPad green screen app. BUT, using the tools we have this is what we are doing. Doing it this way though does give the students an experience that they won't find with an iPad. I think knowing that you can make a program like Movie Maker do something it didn't before is valuable knowledge. I also think putting all these pieces together gives you a sense of greater power over a creation. Yes, there are easier ways with different tools but why not this way? And to top it off, I just read this great article on how creating movies involves Higher Order Thinking skills so there you go!

NCEA good stuff like OZOBOTS

I recently returned from the National Catholic Educators Association conference in Orlando (nice!). Co-presented on two topics: Extending the Classroom with Edmodo (dear to my heart!) and Formative Assessment: Requirement for Learning. Both sessions went very well. My co-presenter, Carol Mayo, and I were quite pleased. The sessions I attended were good also. One of my favorite was Full STREAM Ahead with Fredy Padovan. (remember this name and follow him on Twitter and wherever else he roams) And while you are at it you should check out Immaculata-La Salle's 1:1 iPad program website. 

We got to play with Ozobots. Nice and simple robots to introduce students to robotics and coding. App is free. Little robots are @$50 each. But you don't even need an app to use these cool little robots. All you need is a piece of plain white paper and red, green, blue and black markers. Quite impressive and tons of fun!

New Year, New Name, New Look!

2015 has rolled right in and I am back in the game. Changed my blog name- Tail Wagger Tech- the last one just didn't roll off my tongue very well and I had to have something to do with dogs. Had to change the colors and background too just to keep up with all the changes. February kept me pretty busy with some presentations at TCEA in Austin. We presented on Formative Assessment: Required for Learning, Extending Your Classroom with Edmodo, and Using Edmodo Apps to Enhance Learning. The sessions went well and if anyone is interested in those presentations you can find them on my colleague's website www.holdthemayo.org. We will be presenting Formative Assessment and Extending Your Classroom with Edmodo at NCEA in Orlando. Looking forward to some Florida sunshine!

Speaking of Edmodo apps....My sixth grade music class is working on some composer research and they are using the InstaGrok Lite app in Edmodo. Using the apps in Edmodo is very handy since students don't have to log in to more than one thing. The apps operate right in Edmodo. InstaGrok Lite helps students gather information from websites, etc into a mind map of sorts. Another tab is their Journal where they can actually write their paper and take notes. It keeps their pinned websites in a menu to the side. I think it has made organizing their research much easier. If you are an Edmodo user don't be afraid to visit the "app store". There are many apps that are free to use with your classes and many are unlimited use, meaning they can be assigned to all your classes.

If you aren't an Edmodo user, well you really have to take a good look at that! And once you sign up and get a FREE account, check out InstaGrok Lite and all the great apps in Edmodo.