Website of the Week - Voki

http://www.voki.com/

Create an animated avatar that speaks, create a customized avatar that uses text-to-speech to say what you write. Vokis can be embedded in Blogs, wikis and websites.

http://www.voki.com/

Ideas for the classroom:

1) In History, research a famous historical figure: have them "saying" a famous quote.
2) In Language Arts, create a voki for a character in a novel. Have them "saying" a line of dialogue.
3) In World Language, have students introduce themselves in the target language
4) In Math, have students define mathematical terms.
5) In Science, have vokis report the results of a lab.

For more ideas, check out: Voki Lesson Plans

Students Use Phones to Record Lit Circles!

This is one of those ideas that is so good, I wish I had thought of it:

Have your students use their phones to record their Literature Circle Discussions!

The other day I walked into Ms. Z's room for a meeting on another topic but the first thing she shared was the idea above. She was so excited! Having spent years developing different routines and procedures for Literature Circles (or Book Club Meetings as she calls them), she had never been satisfied with how she was assessing student participation in discussion. She described past lessons where she made herself crazy trying to dip in and out of each group's meeting, manically scribbling student quotes, dashing down notes, and completing checklists. It was stressful and an incomplete pictures of how the book clubs were doing.

On this day, she told each group to take out a cell phone and record their meeting. At the end of class, each group was to email her the file of their discussion. Voila! A simple solution for holding each group accountable for their meeting ("Don't say that, this is getting recorded!") and for her to listen more deeply in class ("I could sit and really listen to the meeting.") and for her to follow up on individual contributions (Ms. Z could listen to the meetings later in the day and give specific feedback to students about their role in the group). What a difference.

What I love about this idea is that:

• it is simple - record the meeting, email the teacher
• it uses technology that students already have with them (even in our very economically diverse middle school, there was at least one cell phone per group)
• it puts responsibility on the students (Ms. Z reports that students were even more on task than usual, knowing their discussion was being recorded)
• it amplified the teacher's ability to give feedback to students (she could now be in more than one place at a time!) 

I'd love to hear from others what they think about this strategy. Have you already been doing this? What makes it work well? What challenges have you faced? How has administration responded? Students? Parents? Can you think of other times it's useful to have students use their cell phones to record? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Website of the Week #1

Hoping to make this a new habit. There are so many great websites out there that I often forget what some of the great ones are! I am hoping that by posting just one a week (I'm also email blasting my teachers these) I will be able to share some great resources, remind folks of great resources, and have a nice catalog of some of my favorite sites when I want to put together a presentation or just make a recommendation to a colleague. And my hidden agenda is that maybe this will get me posting to my blog more often. :) So here is the inaugural....

Website of the Week #1

http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Tired of students going to Google for all their research? Try SweetSearch: http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Sweet Search uses only the 35,000 Websites that their staff of researchers, librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved. This helps students find good information faster. Consider recommending this site to students for all their research!

Have you had good luck using Sweet Search? What do students think? Would love to hear your stories!

Fine 'Tooning

with Toontastic

One of my favorite things about the iPads and the apps that have been developed for them is the opportunity for students to show what they know in new and creative ways. A great example of this is the app Toontastic.

Toontastic is a story-telling app. Its stand-out feature from other story-telling apps or software is that it provides the skeleton for the basic elements of a story – setting, conflict, resolution and conclusion. What happens is that when you open the app, you are invited to make a new cartoon. As you do so, the app displays a visual of this story arc. This encourages the author or cartooner to consider more than just how the story will start, but how the story will build and then be resolved. I love this aspect since we’ve all seen too many digital stories where the visuals are wonderful but the story-telling is lacking.

Another great aspect of Toontastic is that it is scaffolded in a way that a very young child could use it with very limited support (ask my 5-year-old about this). However, it is also sophisticated enough that a high school student can tailor the app to fit his or her creative ambitions (ask the ninth and tenth graders I worked with last week). The scaffolding happens this way: there are already scenes drawn for you and animated characters created that you can choose. For instance, you can select a pirate boat, desert island, and ocean scene with pirates, sharks and crabs. This is great for simple story telling, again, ask my son who has made endless stories about these pirates. Or, you can draw your own scene, tailor the animated characters or create your own characters. This is what the high schoolers I worked with did to describe the four agents of erosion. They amazed me with the sophisticated drawings they made or the creative decisions they made about designing their own characters that they could animate.

From an educator’s perspective, Toontastic gets five stars for student engagement. When I first introduced Toontastic, I made my own sample story. I had a good time creating it and laughing at myself as I showed it to the kids. They were amused, but what got them to the edge of their seats was when I showed them how I made the little movie. I could see their posture change as they realized they were going to be able to create their own movie using this app. Students would so much rather have the chance to make something original and imaginative than complete a worksheet or watch a dated movie clip.

In addition to the cartooning piece of Toontastic, students can also record their voice and add (pre-set) music to their films. This is one of my favorite aspects of Toontastic but one of the hardest sells for high school students. Some students did a great job with this, writing out what they were going to say, practicing and perfecting it until they were satisfied. Others shied away or avoided this aspect in any way they could manage. As I do more with Toontastic and high-schoolers I think I will do more to get them ready for recording their voices. I hope that in the future, we can create instructional cartoons that we would show to a younger grade level to teach a concept. I work with a number of bilingual students and it would be so great if they would make ‘Toons in their home language that could be used in classes with native speakers.

One other take-away from my first go ‘round with Toontastic had to do with saving work. Toontastic saves the settings each student creates and even the story they are working on, which is great. What is tough with iPads though is that when the next class sits down to use them, they can see all the previous classes’ work. Actually, seeing it I don’t mind at all, deleting it, I mind a lot. On our first day we had two different students delete other students work. I was devastated when I realized what had happen. Those first kids had worked so hard, only to have it gone by the end of the day. This helped me learn a few things:

1. Be sure to know which student is using which iPad – whether this is through a sign-out sheet, permanent assignment of iPads or another system, accountability breads responsibility
2. As soon as a student feels their ‘Toon is done, upload it to the Toontastic website. Toontastic has a website associated with their app where all the ‘Toons can be viewed. Once the ‘Toons are up there, only the teacher can delete them.
3. Be clear about expectations with the iPads. I feel we had done a good job talking about handling the equipment safely and staying on task, but I had not been specific about respecting other students’ work. I am now. *smile*

The other lesson learned is the same lesson I learn over and over again.

Be clear about expectations for the assignment

Our first try with Toontastic yielded really uneven results. I think that is definitely because there wasn’t a clear assignment sheet explaining what we were expecting. While the classes I was working with were small and we frequently reminded students of what they needed to do, a hard-copy assignment sheet laying out expectations, maybe as a checklist would have made a big difference. I swear, I will always require this of teachers I work with in the future.

I am less certain about the requirement to do a story board or rough draft before jumping into an app. These apps generate so much innovation, I’m wonder if a rough draft would limit the resourcefulness of the students. Students often thought of ways to show the content (agents of erosion, the rock cycle) that they probably wouldn’t have consider until they started using the app. Similarly, they might have had an idea in their storyboard that they couldn’t recreate in the app. I am still debating about this part of digital stories. I feel like more planning would make for better projects, but I’m not sure at what point this should happen. I’m wondering if you let the kids create for 20-30 minutes and then have a check-in point where partner’s review each other’s work and give suggestions. This has the added benefit of students getting ideas from each other and students practicing giving productive feedback.

So, as you can see, I’m still Fine ‘Tooning my work with Toontastic. I would love to hear from you what projects you’ve tried with this app! Or what suggestions you have about how to use it effectively in classrooms. Or, if you teach Kindergarten to Grade 5 and would like to collaborate, with my students teaching your students new concepts through Toontastic!

4tVirtual Con Adventures with Digital Reading/Writing Workshop

In addition to collaborating and presenting on The Global Classroom Project (Teachers Teaching Teachers About Global Projects) I was lucky enough to pull together four amazing Language Arts/English teachers to share their experiments and adventures with Digital Reading/Writing Workshop at the 4tVirtualCon. If you've read some of my other posts: Dude, Can You Please Edit and We Have Authentic Voices, you know that one of my passions is using digital tools to give students authentic opportunities to write and to reflect on what they've read. These four teachers are doing it and shared their ideas in this presentation.


I wanted to use this post to share their amazing work. They were all generous enough to also share some hand-outs they use and resources they found helpful. If you have additional resources or if you've blogged about similar topics, please comment here and add your own ideas, links or questions!


Here is a link to the slides from the presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/edtechdunny/dude-canyoupleaseeditss


Read more about "The Students Take Control: Virtual Literature Circles" here: http://elenagreertlpproject2012.weebly.com/index.html


Plus, read this article from Educational Leadership: http://www.educationalleadership-digital.com/educationalleadership/201009?pg=52&pm=2&u1=texterity#pg52 

Read and listen to middle and high school students publishing their work: http://authentic-voices.wikispaces.com/


Resources for trying out character blogs: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dyiohc9mix4u5or/MZOcLxZON_


Plus this great post from Read, Write, Think: http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/creating-character-blogs-1169.html 


Highly recommended reads:


The Digital Writing Workshop by Troy Hicks
Because Digital Writing Matters by National Writing Project, with Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks


And, here is the link to our presentation:  https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-22.1458.M.86D4BB880224F640E9607ED9214AC7.vcr&sid=2009317