Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

As I was perusing Classroom 2.0 this morning while enjoying my chai tea and postponing the real work of the day,  I came across a request on the Main Page by an Australian educator named Stacey Kelly. First if you haven’t joined this great online community of educators, you’re really missing out. They have a great webmeet for ‘newbies’ like me in Elluminate at 9am on Saturday mornings (Pacific time).  The last one was on tagging and using the social bookmarking website, Diigo,  in classrooms. Second if you’re in Canada or the US and can help Stacey out, I’m sure she’d appreciate hearing from you.

Now to math: I attended a session by our Smart/Notebook instructional development rep last week and she mentioned a website of interactive math games and activities called the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives.  Students can work online or schools can purchase site licenses or CD’s to use on individual computers. You can play in 3 languages: English, French, or Spanish.

I found some of the 9-12 problems to be pretty challenging and a little obscure for my students. It would have been nice if they’d loaded sample solutions to help the students get started. As you can see in the 21 game below, there can be a lot of trial and error involved if the students receive no guidance in how to develop a solution strategy.

This next game on adding equivalent fractions, again with some intervention from the teacher, can be a great way to illustrate to older students why the fractions must have the same denominators in order to be able to collect the pieces. Alternatively, you can let the kids loose and ask them to play until they come up with the reason. Get them to write their reasons on a hidden screen, and then review with the class when they’ve all had a chance to experiment either individually or in pairs. With an interactive whiteboard it’s easy to annotate and add the final explanation, screen capture, and put into a notebook file that students can look up if they want to review.

Hmmmm . . . I just had a thought. There are many students who make it into algebra and can collect like terms perfectly well, but cannot conceptualize why they have to have common denominators to add fractions. I suspect they got mixed up right at the beginning and resorted to trying to memorize steps that made no sense. Once the memorization failed, they gave up. When I make older kids learn this task in grade 10 or 11, they can systemize and reproduce the steps more capably, but often still have no concept of why this has to be done. I think if I combine this game and the idea of like terms (which they do understand), I can finally help them crack some of the confusion about fractions.

Finally if you’d like me to share my notes from the Classroom 2.0 webinar on tagging/Diigo or from the pro-d I attended on suggested strategies, tactics, and skills for using a Smartboard & Notebook software more effectively, leave me a comment and I’ll pass them along.

Well, as many Canadians do, I overdid at Christmas and went shopping on Boxing Day (Dec. 26). To paraphrase Herodotus: neither snow nor sleet nor jack-knifed & skidding busses blocking traffic could keep me from my appointed rounds. This was our first White Christmas since 1998. 

Today I spent the day inviting all the Canadian educators and bloggers -- including ex-pats and guests who are working here -- listed in Classroom 2.0 to join a new group I set up there. If you qualify, this invitation is for you:

Come on, fellow Canucks (and I don't mean the hockey team!) -- come in out of the snow. Take off your mukluks and tuques. Fortify yourself with a double-double and a plate of Nanaimo bars. Put the u back in 'neighborhood' and let's see if we can't prove that (with apologies to Frank Zappa) the distance between us is not very far!

Join a group in Classroom 2.0 called Canadians Mashup. I'd love to see the network grow, so feel free to pass on this invitation to other Canadian educators and bloggers. OK, eh?!

One request -- when you add yourself to the Frappr map, please include a name or a photo of some sort. There seem to be a lot of unidentified  people from unidentified places and the map is getting stuck on Kansas for some reason. The problem is that I can't tell from the members’ list which anonymous hits are real people and which were just false starts. The company does not differentiate members unless there is a picture or a name. Location only is not enough to help me know which entries are not real ones. THANKS!!!!

I was determined to try Voicethread this holiday as I have a new microphone I have learned to use and a webcam that I have not yet taken out of the box.  To make myself learn this program, I suggested to my family in BC that we collaborate on a Christmas project to send to my Mum in Australia. It's interesting to see how the project grew and how much fun everyone has had working out their contributions, but the project was not without frutrations and I did haveTECHNICAL ISSUES!!

(A) I left the hardest part until the last few hours before the deadline, and when I wanted to record, I kept getting the infamous "Hold On" message until I found this link: http://ed.voicethread.com/help/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=31

(B) I didn't learn how to upload an mp3 (audio) files in time. Katie from the 'Something's Not Working' forum has since kindly sent me the steps which I'll try out this week.
1) Save the file to your computer so that you can find it/browse to it easily.
2) In the voicethread, click "comment," and the comment-option icons will appear.
3) Click the upload button on the far right. It looks like an upward pointing arrow, and Steve points it out in the first slide of this VoiceThread tutorial: http://ed.voicethread.com/help/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=31 (same link as above)
4) Browse to your audio file on your computer and click "open". VoiceThread will automatically begin uploading the file, and your identity's icon will appear in the comments next to the Voicethread slide.

Note : if you can't get the record function to work, Kristy Graham in Australia says you can record the comments in Audacity, save as mp3 files and upload later.

(C) I learned after a lot of trial and error that for video, flv files are definitely more stable than any other type, but to get the best resolution using Adobe Premier Elements I had to:

1) set the image size at 600 by 450 (as instructed in the forums)

2) leave the fps (frames per second) and key frames at 30

3) pop the bitrate to between 2000 and 4000. I have no idea what that does, but until I changed that I just had pixilated blurs from video I shot on my Finepix digital camera.

Sadly, the webcam is still in the box, but the link for Mum's gift arrived in her email just as she and her husband were popping champagne corks for mimosas and slathering up in sunscreen to avoid sunburn (I refer you back to the cartoon at the top of this page!!!!) on Christmas morning which was 4:30 pm Christmas Eve Pacific time.

Source of this image

Is Voicethread a tool I'd recommend? Undoubtedly --  if you are willing to pay for the subscription that will allow you to upload videos of a reasonable length. One of my brothers, I think, is pondering how he could use it to debrief workshops. It's opened a new world of tools to him.  My 77 year old mum and her 80⁺ husband loved watching their gift.

Is there a learning curve? Yes and it is possible that your district may block Voicethread in such a way that you will not be able to upload video or voice which will severely limit the fun you can have. Test all the functions before you launch a project or ask a student to do that for you so you'll know ahead if you can get it to work. Get the IT people in to advise if you are blocked.

How could I use VT in my school? It has great potential as a collaborative tool for compiling and commenting to files. I like the idea of our students using it as a way to make a record of a field trip -- all contributing their best pictures and video clips and commenting on what they did. We could add the link to our school website and invite parents to add comments.

First -- my help request:

Every year our school puts on a full Christmas dinner for our students and their families. Not everyone comes but we usually serve about 150 people. On Tuesday I'm going to arrange the students into groups and give each team 30 minutes to take still photos and make short videos to be complied into a sort of 'Christmas Card' to be shown at the dinner.

I'm looking for ideas online. What's your favourite bit of video, music, holiday cartoon, or Christmas card site? Please leave suggestions in the comments below & thanks!!

These are 2 Nings that I have been read/writing this week, so today's post is about Getting help from my friends 2.0 and BADGES.

(DRAT -- they aren't working!!!! I've emailed the support team to find out why, so please bear with me if you are seeing this before it's fixed.)

The first is Steve Hargadon's Classroom 2.0. This is a great place to pose questions and to get and give answers. There are no foolish questions and plenty of contributers who are willing to share ideas and dilemma fixes.  I work in a small school and so to have this kind of outreach is refreshing and gives new meaning to the word 'colleague'.

(first badge should be here!)  [POST SCRIPT NOTE: THE fIRST BADGE DID NOT PRINT, AND THE LONG CODE WAS SKEWING THE PAGE SO I HAVE REMOVED IT AND DO NOT THINK I CAN ADD PICTURES HERE AFTER THE FACT.]

I have also joined Vickie Davis and Julie Lindsay's  Flat Classroom project as a judge. I'm grouped with teachers from Pakistan, the US, Thailand and Australia; how cool is that!!!  If there's time during the last week of school when the videos have all been posted, I want to get my own students involved in the judging so that we can develop a group who will be interested in participating in a similar project for Earth Day '09.

(second badge should be here!) [POST SCRIPT NOTE: NEITHER DID THE SECOND BADGE]

Later in the week the Glocal people are coming to our school to prepare the staff for a digital imagery workshop they will be doing with our kids in February. This project originates oin Surrey, BC -- right up the hill from where I teach and looks amazing. Anyone can download the software and contribute to the global project.

December starts Monday -- and as you can see from the above, I have a lot to pack into the 3 short weeks left until the holiday starts!!!!!