Classroom Collaboration Series: VoiceThread

Looking for a cool way this summer to keep your students engaged with technology? Here's a way you can make a virtual field trip, an online lesson, a display of student work, or a virtual discussion with your class - VoiceThread.
This is, in a nutshell, what you can do with VoiceThread. Add images or pictures (which could be screen shots of math problems worked out in class, pictures from a field trip, student illustrations, you name it) to create a slideshow. Then, for each slide, you as the teacher may choose to add your voice or type descriptions to each of the slides. You can also write on the images as you record your voice to reference points of interest.
Once you complete your VoiceThread, you can have your students find it online. As they view your VoiceThread, they can make comments on each slide! For example, you may want your students to respond to an image about a science experiment to show what they remember, or it could be as simple as having them leave their memories on a picture from a school field trip. They can comment by typing a response or leaving a recorded message. If you have a webcam available, your students can respond using that as well. What happens after your students comment on the VoiceThread is that you create an online conversation. You and the class can go back and view the show together to view each other's feedback - a great way to review information. Your students can go back and view the VoiceThreads on their own as well to reinforce content or take a virtual field trip of sorts over and over again. You can also download the VoiceThread app to your iPad so you students can access it there as well.
This resource is free...to an extent. Creating a VoiceThread Educator account is free, and the app for iPad is a free download as well. You get 250 MB of space (or 50 VoiceThreads) using your account on the computer, and you can make up to five VoiceThreads using the app. Each VoiceThread you create can have up to 50 slides on your free account (which I think is plenty). You can make it work for you as a free resource if you are willing to delete the VoiceThreads that you aren't using so you don't run out of space. And if you really like it, you can consider getting a classroom license so you can go further with this resource.
If you search on VoiceThread, you will find caboodles of examples of how you can use it in your classroom. Take a look and see the possibilities you could use this for in the fall!
https://voicethread.com/
http://voicethread.com/products/k12/educator/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/voicethread/id465159110?mt=8

APP Time: Presidents vs. Aliens

Yes, that's the name of this app.
In a way, it seems all sorts of wrong to follow up a tribute to Mister Rogers with something so absolutely silly. However, with the presidential election this fall, students will have a lot of interest in the presidents and the fun facts about them. So, for $0.99, the app Presidents vs. Aliens (from the same developer of Stack the States)will help your class learn about past and present commanders-in-chief, all while taking out some alien creatures.
The app asks students questions about a president and shows four pictures of the presidents (with their names) to choose from. The questions range from identifying the president, quotes, nicknames, or facts about the president or time period. You can adjust the level of difficulty and types of questions by clicking on the question mark on the main menu. I'm adding that because I had trouble figuring out where to go to adjust the level at first. This way, you can use this app for younger students who may need to work on just identifying the presidents, to really upping the ante for your "big kids" (such as yourself).
 You will be shown the correct answer if you are wrong (which is good, because some of those questions are down right hard), but if you touch the correct president, the fun begins. You will get to take the president you have correctly selected and shoot him at the mass of aliens that has infiltrated the Washington, D.C., landmark in the background. It requires a little bit of strategy, but it's great fun to send the president airborne into a sea of little neon creatures. When you have taken out all the aliens, your score will show and you will "earn" a new president for your collection. Once you collect all 44 presidents, you can proceed to the bonus games Executive Order and Heads of State, already included on the app.
Presidents vs. Aliens also teaches your students test taking skills and inferencing. For example, one of the questions might be "Who was president during the Wright Brothers' first flight?" showing the date as well. They have to use logical thinking based on the four presidents shown to determine the best answer for the time period. This is a super app to start off the countdown to Election Day in November and learn fun facts about the exective office. Hail to the chief - but watch out for that alien behind you!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/presidents-vs.-aliens/id427418941?mt=8

My Thoughts about Mister Rogers

"One of the greatest gifts you can give anyone is the gift of your honest self." - Fred Rogers
Even though you're probably one of the 3 million people that have seen this video by now, I felt compelled as a techKNOW teacher to share it with you. If there is any one person outside of my family that I want to emulate in my teaching, it may very well be Mister Rogers. The creativity and adventures he shared with his young viewers impacted and engaged many of us growing up. I'm sure that you (as well as myself) can recall at least one episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" you watched as a child - how to make crayons, anyone? His kindness and gentle nature give me hope that those of us who aren't so loud and verbally outspoken can impact the education and the conscience of our students.
Television in the 1950s and 1960s was what the Internet is today - new, "cool," and a commercial medium. Fred Rogers took an interest in using television programming to enhance the lives of and teach children, without advertising and leisure entertaining (I added the word "leisure" there because Mister Rogers was both educational and fun to watch). For many, his show modeled a safe and loving home, a caring father figure, and how to pretend play without the zing of cartoon characters or video games. I, for one, loved, loved, loved Mister Rogers' puppets! He saw the potential to use new technology to impact those around the world, children he would never meet but would nonetheless nurture. In a way, you could say he's the original techKNOW teacher.
My favorite thing about Mister Rogers is, like the quote I began this post with, he remained true to himself. He didn't become loud and flashy to attract young viewers to his program. In fact, Fred Rogers may have been seen (and especially would be today) as an unlikely television star - a guy with great ideas, but not the persona to pull it off on camera. Yet it was the fact that he was calm, gentle, and soft spoken that set him a part from the rest. It not only made him unique - it made what he taught his young audiences about life stick. He walked the walk, proof positive the volume of your message isn't measured in decibels.
So, enjoy this "jazzy" version of a beautiful song that encourages all of us to be curious, make believe, and grow the great ideas inside of us. Perhaps if we as teachers instill these values in ourselves and model them in our teaching, our students will absorb them, too.

TrackStar

So, this summer I'm going back to school - sort of. I'm taking some online technology classes through WVLearns because 1) they are free and 2) I don't know everything. I may be the techKNOW teacher, but if I want to stay that way I've got to stay on the up-and-up on how to do things. Otherwise I'll run out of things to blog about. The classes I'm taking have to do with creating WebQuests and virtual field trips. I utilize these in my classroom, but I want to be more skilled in how to make my own "stuff" to tailor to my own classroom.
One of the gems I have found to help me organize websites for virtual field trips is TrackStar. There are many fabulous web tools accessible through 4Teachers.org, one of which I reviewed two posts ago (RubiStar). I thought TrackStar was going to be too similar to Portaportal to be something I would start using, but it definately has its own place in the techKNOW classroom. You use TrackStar to group - or track - websites, online videos, Vokis, and interactives so they can be accessed by your students all at once for the purpose of a virtual field trip.
It's super simple. Once you create your free account (everything on 4Teachers.org is free, I believe), you will go to your account page and select the "Make New Track" button. Give your track a catchy title and a description, so your students as well as teachers who search for other tracks on TrackStar know what this grouping of resources is all about. You also choose what "type" of track this is going to be (I'll let you read that for yourself, as it's pretty self explanatory) in addition to the subject area.
Make a few other choices on that page and you're off to enter your online resources into your track. THIS is what makes it cool. You enter a title/topic for your website, paste the URL below, AND THEN...you can annotate! Yeah, I know, what's so great about annotating? LOTS! You can give your students an exciting description of what they are about to view, provide background information, or give questions for them to answer as they view the resource. It makes your virtual field trip something that can be done completely independently!
After you enter your websites and annotations, submit it and BOOM you have your track! On your account page, you will see the title of your track along with a number. You can have your students go to the computer lab and search for your virtual field trip by typing in this number OR...make a folder on Portaportal for your TrackStar creations and store the direct links to your tracks there! All your students have to do once they are on the track you have created is click "View in Frames" (my preference, you can view in text as well) to begin their virtual field trip adventure! When you view in frames, the links appear on the left hand side; all your students have to is click on them and the online resource will appear in a frame on the screen below your annotation. In other words, no clicking back  and forth to the list of resources.
It's great to see it all put together! If you want to experience a track yourself, you can view my virtual field trip on the Underground Railroad here. You can also search for other tracks that have already been created by keyword. As long as you don't choose that your track is a default (which is deleted after a week), it will remain on TrackStar indefinately. You can create virtual field trips to use this upcoming school year and beyond! Have fun!
http://trackstar.4teachers.org/trackstar/index.jsp
http://trackstar.4teachers.org/trackstar/ts/viewTrack.do?number=442504

Classroom Collaboration Series: ClassChatter

Got that Portaportal page set up yet? Even if you don't, I'm moving on. I had a fabulous (or at least I thought so) series of posts a few months ago all about grant writing. My next "series" of posts which I will feature this summer will have to do with online collaboration for the classroom. I can't guarantee what day of the week I am going to post them like I did for my grant writing series because I'm on "island time" for the next 10 weeks and  four days (whatever - you counted, too) but they will appear weekly.
One of the wonderful things about using web tools for classroom collaboration is that it often makes your life a tiny bit less paperless AND it plays into your students' growing interest and understanding of how to use the Internet to communicate. We all know that  outside of school many of our kiddos chat online, e-mail, and social network, whether they are of age to do so or not. And although there are steps you can take to make sure parents and students know what's safe and appropriate, there's no stopping the access  your students have once they leave your classroom. That's why it's good - almost necessary - to give students web tools to display and communicate what they know and what they need to say so they learn the proper way to communicate online - for learning and social purposes.
The first item to add to your virtual toolbox (which is hopefully housed on your PORTAPORTAL page) is ClassChatter. I have used ClassChatter for several years and have found it to be teacher friendly and student adored. This is a way for you to create FREE, password protected blogs for your classroom. Your students can learn to blog in a safe environment that cannot be accessed by anyone else except the teacher and classmates. You create student accounts under your teacher account so that you see whatever the students write. There is also a "cMail" teacher account where the students can send messages to you without the entire class reading it.
As the teacher you can create topic blog posts for students to respond to - I usually make these anything from introducing yourself to the class to current events - and then (my favorite) you can create assignment blogs! This is where you create an assignment for students to respond to under your original post. Students can work on it and come back to it, checking the finished assignment button when they have completed their post. As the teacher you can see who is still working, who has finished, and who hasn't even started yet (Grrr!). I've made my assignment blogs anything from listing the factors of a selected number, to researching a volcano, to creative writing prompts. Each student automatically gets their own blog page when you create their accounts as well. You can set the purpose for this or encourage your students to create their own blogs about things that interest them - a great way to get your cherubs to WANT to write! You also get your own teacher blog page as well to keep the class informed about whatever you'd like.
What ClassChatter lacks in "pretty" - there's no changing the colors, theme, or overall look - it makes up 110% in functionality. In a way, it's good the students (and the teacher for that matter) can't really mess with the appearance because it makes you focus on the content over the bells and whistles. My class has always been so into "we have a blog" that they've never brought up what it looks like. Oh, you will see some advertisements to upgrade to ClassChatterLive, but the free version provides you with plenty to get your class blogging safely and purposefully. Check it out and consider setting up your account for next year!
http://www.classchatter.com/