Here are the slides for a presentation I will be giving to the SJA Language Department on Tuesday, 9/16.
A new school year is upon us and STJLabs is getting ready for full deployment. Here is what we’re currently working on:
Academics Manager: 10 teachers will be trained next week to use the new class pages module. Over the next several months they will be testing out the system and becoming comfortable enough to run their own training sessions during January’s in-service.
SJA ResNet: 9 students have been brought together to found the first student run SJA networking support team. The group will be based out of the library and will be there to answer any and all computer-related questions. The office will start being staffed during the week of 9/22.
Web Filter Policies: For the first time in 7+ years SJA’s web filter policies have been loosened. Blogs, forums, and streaming media sites are now unblocked. Enjoy!
I have been searching for a way to give my students a way to listen to the daily vocabulary at home. During the semester I have tried, with Josh’s considerable help, to devise a delivery system. I thought I was all set but then I found this other website that creates flash cards with sound. It also sets up games for the kids to play with the flash cards. It is very easy for the teacher to set up and I think more engaging for the student than just the written word and the sound. I haven’t had any feedback from the kids yet and I’ll let you know when they do. My card lists are in:
http://www.byki.com/user/dgandiastj
YouTube has a lot to offer the world, besides the wonders of the next LightSaber kid or a home video of someone getting injured at a wedding. Clips of news broadcasts, homemade video of important world events – if you take the time to plumb the depths of online video, the educational opportunities are endless.
Of course, due to filtering issues, we can’t access YouTube here on campus. But there’s a perfect clip of “The Colbert Report” you want to show in your Current Events class. What oh what to do?
There are a lot of ways to handle this – plugins for Firefox, downloadable programs, scripts you can run in browers, etc etc. The process I’m about to outline is a little slower than some other methods, but it is the easiest in terms of steps.
First off, you’re going to need a home computer and Net access – broadband recommended, the faster the better.
Find the video you want on YouTube – or Google Video, or almost any other Flash-based video site. Go to the page with the actual video. A quick word about YouTube – say you’re looking for a clip from “The Colbert Report”, and you find five samples of the same clips. You’ll want to take a quick look at the first few seconds of each clip to determine which ones are the best looking. Some people upload files with terrible encoding, others upload pristine copies. Go with the best-looking one, it’ll result in a better end-product.
You’ll then want to open a new window, and in that new window head over to http://www.all2convert.com/index.html. This is an online converter / downloader for Flash Videos. Look on the left-hand side of this new page. There is a field marked “URL Video”. Copy and paste the URL of the video you want (from your original window) into this field. Below that is a drop-down menu. Choose the last option: “WMV Windows Video” (it is not the best choice, but it’s the only choice that is guaranteed to work with our Windows Media Player here on campus due to codec issues). In a few moments, your file will start downloading. Your mileage may vary in terms of time, subject to the speed of your home connection.
Then all you need is a school computer and LCD projector to show the clip in class. I highly recommend putting Windows Media Player in “Full Screen Mode” when doing so. In terms of actually getting the videos to school – they’re going to be too large to email to yourself through the school’s email system, so you can either use an external email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) or you can put them on USB keys and bring them in.
You can obviously convert multiple clips at a time, and when you bring them to school set them up as a playlist on Windows Media Player.
These clips will be of decent-but-not-spectacular quality – but keep in mind that Flash videos are half the resolution and half the frame rate of “normal” video, which is how the files are kept at a reasonable size.
Next time – how to rip DVD’s for more efficient classroom use.
Hello -
SMARTboard
Katie Crowley and I have been using the SMARTboard in our classes on a routine basis. It may appear to be intimidating at first, but it is unbelievably user friendly! The SMARTboard is a combination of your computer’s desktop and a white board – anything that you open on the computer is projected onto the board. You can write on images, movies, websites, word documents, powerpoint presentations… and then save and print everything! Useful when a student has missed an important lecture or even when you run out of time at the end of class… just open up the document and everything is there.
It is particularly useful to discuss documents and images. We have used the board with our students to analyze paintings, political cartoons, and other primary sources. The students have a real sense of ownership as they are the ones taking apart the documents and teaching their classmates the material. Students that do not usually take notes on activities like these take notes with the SMARTboard. Standard level students love this technology.
One of our favorite things: when studying the age of Absolutism, visiting interactive websites like this one. When Katie showed this to her students, one of her standard level students who is not normally enthusiastic about history got very excited. He is interested in woodworking and told his classmates about how much time and money the inlaid floors would have cost.
stjlabs.com blog
I have been using the blog (www.dscavitto.stjlabs.com!) to post assignments. I will be sending the address to parents as well so they have a chance to check on assignments and what we are doing in class. This has been great for some of my absentminded kids who tend to lose their syllabi…
gmail.stjlabs email and Google Docs
I am in love with Google Docs and knowing that my students can communicate with me over email. I have cleared up many questions about assignments – especially our research project! Having email lists has been handy as I find websites that will be helpful for their project. I’ve also chatted with a few of my students using the chat feature in Gmail when we are both online and the kids love it.
I’m also collecting papers over Google Docs and grading them and sending them back to my students that way. We’ll be using it more as we start writing our musicals in small groups (Oh yes! Musicals on the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the French Revolution!!) and the students can collaborate that way.
We’ll post more later as we try new things! Thanks Josh for all of your help with everything!
Not having access to software can be a major pain for students. They might not have a certain office application or the ability to open/create a given media file. So, one our projects has been to look into Open Source, or at least free software solutions that we could bundle to students. The idea would be to package it onto a cd or flash drive and distribute it to every incoming student.
Well, it’s always nice to find out it’s already been done before :)
Check out: SoftwareFor.org: Home of Software for Starving Students
From the website:
“Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a full-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more. For more information, check out our Questions and Answers.”
This looks fantastic. I’m going to try it out myself and have some student play with it. I’ll post more once I know more :)
The next Tech Integration meetings will take place next Tuesday (2/19) and Thursday (2/21) in the Library Media Room. Tuesday’s meeting will run from 7-7:30am and Thursday’s will run from 3:30-4pm. We’ll be covering the same information at each meeting so you only need to attend one.
Here’s a brief outline of how I’m using my TabletPC:
I just came across this blog post and thought it was worth sharing. Sound familiar? :)
(Written on 2/3/08) I’ve been using computers since they were as big as a bus and we had to feed them punched cards. I started my work life as an Economist doing research on tariffs which required massive numbers of punched cards. It took me a couple of years to punch all the commas in the right place. I had to program all that in Fortran and I’m very glad that’s all over.
Over the years I kept up with the new technology introduced in the world of computers both at work and at home, including websites.
I have been teaching Spanish (a rather accidental transition) since the turn of the millennium and I am especially interested in using technology to help students with learning disabilities learn Spanish. I find that children, who have trouble paying attention to a lady speaking in a foreign language, love to sit for hours in front of a computer listening to the same language and playing language games. For those kids, developing reinforcement tools might be invaluable.
My immediate problem is that I have been laid low by a horrible cold for the last two weeks and I’m trying to conserve what little energy I have to teach class, etc. I haven’t been able to get to work with all these wonderful toys.
The one thing I did do was introduce Google Documents to the students and, having ironed out some initial problems; things are going swimmingly for us all.
For those who might be thinking of using Google Documents let me tell you that story. Since I had difficulty talking (and I talk a lot in language class since, at the moment, I am the only one in the room who knows the target language) I decided to move our Hispanic Country Project forward and started working on that.
The project consists of a Power Point presentation on a Hispanic country. The presentation is in English for SP 1 and in Spanish for SP 3. The first day we went to the language lab was almost a disaster. All of them knew enough about Power Point to start the presentation but some don’t have it at home, some don’t have a thumb drive, and thus couldn’t save what they had done. We scrambled and all was well in the end but I knew we had to find alternatives.
Enter Google Docs. They still need a thumb drive but only for a few minutes at a time (while they save pictures from the internet and then upload them to the presentation). This makes it easier to share a thumb drive. They can also work from home and from the library and don’t need to have Power Point at home.
Google is ten times better than I could possibly be in explaining how to set up a gmail account and the Google Documents account. I had to point them in the right direction when it came to uploading their presentations and making me a collaborator. My guess is that 75% of the kids have set everything up correctly and I told them they should all be set up by tomorrow (Monday). I will be able to help anyone who still has difficulty in the lab tomorrow.
As their collaborator I have been able to check their progress, their revisions, make suggestions and corrections. Up to now I am very impressed. It is easy to use and allows me to keep track of their work, which, I hope, will cut down on extensions and will improve the quality of the work. I want this to be quality work not just for the author’s sake but also because I hope the other children will learn something useful from each one of the presentations.