edna.edu.au

LAMS Advanced Training Notes

• Best to use Firefox
• If you put in a stop point before the end then you can go into live edit and add activities
• You can drag your students forward
• Use the sequence settings to turn on IM
• Time graph can be useful but also doesn't take into account if
• You can export the whole file into a zip file you can read offline in your browser
• You can group students in random groups, by answers or results or by learner choice
• The forums are useful for a short smaller discussion.  What is the value over a chat? Time?
• Use the 'arrange activities' option to get students back on the task of designing and off trying to rearrange the icons
• To ensure you have a final product for assessment purposes make sure you tick 'lock when finished''
• Conditional branching - you can do all kind of tricky things to assess what is happening in the learning and then leading students down different paths depending on needs
• Optional sequences - allow you to give you students choice - you can do any one of these
• You can also put branches within optional sequences - but you'll need to drag them to the canvas first
• You can add up to 2 layers of branching
• Optional activities are great to give students more control over their learning
• Tip: repeat questions either as an extra noticeboard

Questions:

• Can you make a class/group that has more than one class?

Things to test out:

• Competency editor
• Support activities

Tags: macict tips ideas technology notes lams
Posted at 12:04PM Jun 18, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[2]

Adobe Captivate Resources

Great presentation from Stacey from the Centre for Learning Innovation today.

Here are links to some of the resources created using Adobe Captivate:

•  Cultivating Art
  

What I like about Captivate:

• You can basically build an entire website using Captivate - but it's even better because you can also cultivate interactivity.
• Students are able to build quizzes and learning sequences
  

Her tips:

• Think about the storyboard
• Get started, then have a look at your design, then edit or start again
• Keep testing your design until it feels right
• Timing is important when you are hiding and revealing things
• Get the kids to use it for projects, presentations etc
  

I also noticed Captian Captivate on the Adobe website.  Once you get started you can dip into this online space to get support.

Tags: macict features captivate tips laptops adobe
Posted at 04:46PM Jun 17, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Tech: Digital Images

After a day of copying and attributing images for the me.edu.au workshop I decided I should take the time to document the process.

• From the British Film Industry - a good scope and sequence

• Adobe Digital Education Instruction projects
• Tale Lesson Plans eg Where's Gladys

• Teachers - Flickr
  
• Students - Wikimedia Commons or ?
  

• All Right to Copy - Images

• The Smart Copying website explains how most media must be credited.  All Right to Copy - Images - Crediting
  
• If you highlight the text of the name in Flickr and then right click and select 'Copy with URL' this will copy the name of the artist and the url of the image at the same time
• This is the best place to find lots of images that are easy to link the same generic Creative Commons 2.0 licenceMore tips on using digital images in the classroom.

• Taking screen shots can be an important aspect of learning about digital images.  Click here to read how you can take a picture of your screen and how this can be a useful teaching activity.
• More tips on using digital images in the classroom....
  

Also posted on my MacICT wiki.

Tags: tips ideas images
Posted at 06:14PM Mar 07, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[1]

Moderating comments

Commenting is an important aspect of blogging.  It's a good idea to turn comment moderation off on your me.edu.au blog so that users will be able to see their comment on your blog.  This also means you don't have to remember to check your blog to see if anyone has commented so that you can approve them.  To turn off comment moderation:

1. Click on the 'edit blog' tab
   
2. Click on the 'preferences' tab
3. Click on 'turn of comment moderation' in the comments section
   

Tags: showme comments tips me.edu.au
Posted at 09:18PM Feb 10, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[1]

Scratch

Scratch is everything they said it would be and I love it. In about an hour I created about 10 different animations including a flying bird, throwing a basketball and two butterflies having a conversation.

Classroom uses:

• Talking and listening - explaining what your characters will do, how you will make things move etc
• Storyboard and creating narratives
• Demonstrating science activities and concepts
• Creating simple demonstrations
• Making or playing games eg Archery Champion
  

Challenges:

• The biggest challenge is working out some of the fiddly maths bits like how far an object should travel on the x&y
  

The resources are on the Macquarie ICT wiki. You can also learn more at the Learn Scratch website.

Tags: tips teachingideas ideas free software ict macquarie scratch
Posted at 10:12AM Jan 22, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Technology Integration Update

Updates

• The projector can be used in the computer lab or the hall.  You can use this for a number of things including showing movies on the big screen.  The speakers are in the cupboard.
• The computers in the lab have been updated to the latest version of iLife, it's easy to learn and fun
• The next update will mean that all old games and no standard stuff will be removed.  There are lots of free resources that you can use.  Just ask.
  

Publishing and sharing student media

There are lots of way of sharing ideas, student work, lesson reflections, giving praise, recognising achievement.  We have started by showing examples of student work at assembly.

• Another way of sharing is through Our Blog
• Eventually each student could create their own - this also becomes a record of learning
  

Creating student media

There are lots and lots and lots of tools you can use to get students creating media using different tools.  We are going to look at a couple today.  Let me know which others might be useful.

• iLife and Photobooth - instructional movies here
  
• Flickr.com & Flickr.storm (here is a storm I have started on Products & Services)
• Dipity - timelines - there are lots of other things like this
  
• GoAnimate - lots of similar resources to this
  

Everyday free educational games and interactive resources

• Literacy - eg Starfall
  
• Halloween - eg House
  
• Maths - eg BBC
  
• Music - our kids love music and there are lots of interactive games like this
  

Accessibilty tools

• Screen reader - instructions here
• Improving visibility
• Audio books eg StoryNory
  

Theme based interactive resources

• Social Skills eg TalkDog
  
• Create your own resources eg quizzes and game shows to use with the class
  
• Virtual excursions eg virtual city, different countries
  
• More examples
  

Individual student lesson plans and resources

• Danielle - Dove Interactives Self Esteem
• Robbie - Skull a day project

There are a couple of ways we can work together this term. 

• Shared time to plan for technology integration.
  
• Weekly links and ideas email.
• You can come into the classroom and watch me use iMovie or similar
• We can use some RFF time to co-teach a lesson.
• More Wednesday sessions - if so what do you want to see

And then ...

The resources I've linked to above are just a starting point.  This video shows how technology is changing.  This is a challenge and an opportunity for our students.  In a world where we are many pieces, loosely joined it is more possible than ever to find a niche for our students, a way to participate, a way to belong.  Improving accessibility through technology, personal learning networks, using serious games and virtual worlds to engage learners are just some of the areas that we can start to explore.  Make a comment at the end of this blog post and let me know what you want to learn more about.

Tags: technology ideas links tips resourc
Posted at 10:32PM Oct 21, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Consequences lesson using GoAnimate

I made this animation using GoAnimate in about 20 minutes.  It's a fun, simple way to provide an alternative method of communicating ideas.   This should work in pretty nicely with our learning to accept consequences for actions unit.

Things to remember:

• The screen demo on the mainpage is good and give a good overview of features and how to use them and it has pretty exciting music
  
• If you want to add movement to an object you need to do it before you move it to the character
• There are some slightly undesirable actions but I think this can be managed through a quick laugh and letting the kids know it's not appropriate for the work we are doing at the moment
  

Tags: literacy teachingideas showme socialskills fun interesting technology tips
Posted at 02:40PM Oct 10, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Multimedia Jeopardy For Your Classroom

Teachers in the Sydney Region in NSW are a lucky bunch.  The Sydney Region Schools IT Service provide a blog (Podcast Lane) to help teachers and ICT Co-ordinators with the practical aspects of integrating technology in their classroom.  I found this great interactive Jeopardy game resource (for PC users) on their blog.

Not only does it have heaps of ready made quizzes available but it is also completely customisable meaning that you can create a quiz for your students or better yet get the students to create the quiz themselves.  You can add any kind of media as part of your quiz including pictures, audio files and movie files.

This resources is an amazing way to get students working on little bits of media - vox pops on content as part of the questions for Stage 2, taking pictures of the school environment for Stage 1, literature review for any stage.... the list is unending.

Depending on how you use the tool it can teach some of the skills of the 21st Century I talked about in my previous post including - play, negotiation, distributed cognition or performance.

Nice work Stu!

Tags: tools tips ideas allstages game showme
Posted at 03:20PM Sep 14, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Movie Maker Projects

Using Movie Maker in the classroom is fun, it's pretty easy to get started and there are lots of resources available online to help you.  Having worked on Movie Maker projects it's great how quickly kids learn the program and how creative they can be when creating their own projects.  So here are some examples of Movie Maker work I've found in the past few weeks:

• Movie Maker projects from a sports day.  Click here to view
• Movie Maker projects on Capital Cities.  Click here to view
  

Atomic Learning has a great series of videos on using Movie Maker.  I have used these myself and with Year 4 students.  You can also check out this video which explains a bit more about using Movie Maker in the classroom.

Tags: multimedia tips showme work samples primary
Posted at 08:04PM Jun 25, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Resources - Global Connections Units

I have been working with a class on integrating technology in their Global Connections Unit.  Here is a list of resources we have been using. 

• http://www.drinking-water.org an interactive map showing where water is available and how it is used.
  
• http://quikmaps.com/ draw on google maps.  Create an interactive annotated map of your unit.
  
• http://www.breathingearth.net/  The kids were amazed by this.  It's an interactive map with statistics on population, CO2 emissions, births and deaths.  We spent some time comparing the size of countries to their emissions.  Particularly interesting was the comparison of Australia's small populations and high CO2 emissions to countries traditionally blamed for high emissions such as India or China.
• United Nations Comtrade database.  This is good.  You need to go to the metadata and reference section, then to a country.  For example if you go to Australia you can see the major trading partners we have.
• http://earth.google.com/ you can explore the Crisis in Dafur using tools created by the Museum Mapping Iniative.

Tags: primary worl link tips stage showme hsie globalconnections idea
Posted at 11:24AM Jun 24, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |