Popplet Criteria

One of the principles of quality learning we push with our students is knowing what success looks like. We do this in quite a few ways but having a success criteria is pretty up there.

This week our classes are publishing their short stories on Comiclife, one of the student's favourite ways to publish and share their work. This criteria below was created using Popplet. I love this tool for the following reasons.

1. You can create visually stunning posters in less time than it takes to shake a stick.

2. You can import images, links and video as well as text.

3. It is interactive but also adaptable to be static - you can export or take a screenshot and print this into a great poster for the wall.

This embeded version lets the user move it around, zoom in and out and, if there are videos they can be played within the window, too.

So far this term we have created two different posters of criteria that students can refer back to; this one and one for creating a great instructional video on Doodle Cast Pro (a great video making app). My hope is that we will create a wall of criteria that will help guide the student to success for a whole range of publishing / sharing tools they can choose.

Mediamash Workshop Slides

I'm part of an initiative called, 'Mediamash' which is aimed at inspiring schools to dig into the treasure chest of digital media for their learning programmes.

Today we launched our first teacher and student workshops. These are the slideshows from 2 workshops I ran, with a colleague.

I always love talking with other teachers about the systems and methods we're using in our classes - especially ones with so much passion and enthusiasm for giving our students the best possible learning experiences!

Rewind'ed' and Mash'ed'

Yesterday our class created some artwork using a simple checkerboard pattern and a 3D effect. To walk them through the process I used the paperfiftythree app - great to screen share with the appleTV and create your own digital whiteboard.

It was when I used the rewind feature (2 fingers moved in a circular motion) to show them the process from start to finish that I realised the whole process could be captured in a screenshare movie. And with a little 'mashing', here's what it looked like.

So - here's the process from 'woah to go' (why is it in that order? Nonsensical).

1. Create the drawing in Paperfiftythree

2. Screenshare to laptop using Reflector app

3. Capture video using Quicktime Pro

4. Import and create video on iMovie

5. Create soundtrack clip on Iambeatbox app

6. Share to Soundcloud and download

7. Add to video project in iMovie

8. Upload to Youtube

Phew. It's always amazing how apps, programmes and sites share to each other. That's what you could call 'Mashed'.

Planning and Assessment with Notability App

I replied to a question on twitter about how I use one ipad in the classroom. Last year we had 1 ipad (now we have 12 which is awesome!) and I decided to make the most of it as a teaching tool;

 - I achieved my goal of having a digital planning and assessment approach!

Here's a video of how I use Notability for planning and assessment.

Aurasma - an Interactive, Digital Display

We have a third year college teacher, @mattmurraynz, working with us this year and he is proving to be a handy innovator in his own right.  One of his college assignments this term was to create an interactive display in the classroom.  He told me his class were thinking, 'What? How do you do that?'

With a little bit of chatter and after seeing a great ipad app called aurasma lite he came up with an idea for using augmented reality and the student's learning about taonga - special treasures.

The student's held their taonga and spoke about it's importance to them, then Matt made this into a video. The video is uploaded to aurasma and a screen shot of the video was printed out and hung on the wall.

Matt then went through the steps on the app to take an image of the photo and linked it to the uploaded video. And below is the result. When you hold the aurasma app view finder up to the image it shows the video of the student speaking inside the image of the photo.

How cool would our classrooms, office foyers, shopping mall walls, and street signs be with this kind of interaction?

App of the week!

Here's the first 'App of the Week' - it could also be the last, who knows. I have @sharpjacqui to thank for sharing the news that this app (she called it one of her favs) was free on itunes for 2 days... so naturally I was curious.

Yes, it was the free part. Can you blame me.

Here are some screen shots from itunes on Halftone.

It's a great app for uploading photos, adding text and a few icons. Very easy to use and, as most apps will allow these days, whatever you create can be shared on facebook, twitter and emailed.

Some fun ahead, I think! My first go is on the side of my blog.