Yesterday, I introduced the Storybird website and students created books. Storybird is an amazing website. Professional artists upload their work and allow Storybird and its members to use them in the books viewed on Storybird. The art work is beautiful. Members use them to illustrate stories that they compose on the website. Then members can invite specific people, or the general public, to collaborate on the story. I imagine a grandparent living far enough away that visits are rare, beginning a story and then inviting a grandchild to compose with him. Through emails they write together and discuss their story development. When they are finished, they can publish it on the web so that everyone may enjoy and comment on their work. Just now, Storybird has released its beta version, but soon, they promise, books may be ordered to be printed for a small fee. This is where Storybird will generate funds so that the website can remain free. The website organizes the artwork by artist and by topic, and conveniently offers a link to the artists’ web pages or commercial printers, so the artists have an outlet for their work. This is a win-win-win scenario. The website makes money on the book printing orders. The artists make money on the sale of their artwork. My students write stories that are illustrated by professional quality pictures and develop their literary skills.
This is the link to storybird: http://storybird.com/ All technology club members logged in as “saukview,” so search for books by that author/user name, to see our work. We hope you enjoy our stories!
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Thoughts re: Meeting March 3, 2010
Skype. Très cool!
Our wonderful technicians installed Skype on all the lab computers and established 20 accounts for each elementary building. They arranged it so that we could only talk to the other two buildings, so we didn’t have to worry about strangers. Mrs. F, the other teacher, whose Tech Club was chatting with us, had arranged to upload her students’ pictures. Her students had personalized their user names with their pictures and were quite chatty. We caught up and attached our pictures to our user names easily. It was an excellent idea to do that; it was so easy to see who you were talking to and made them much more real and approachable. My students recognized several of the students from after school activities and it was nice for them to talk with them in a different context.
Our wonderful technicians installed Skype on all the lab computers and established 20 accounts for each elementary building. They arranged it so that we could only talk to the other two buildings, so we didn’t have to worry about strangers. Mrs. F, the other teacher, whose Tech Club was chatting with us, had arranged to upload her students’ pictures. Her students had personalized their user names with their pictures and were quite chatty. We caught up and attached our pictures to our user names easily. It was an excellent idea to do that; it was so easy to see who you were talking to and made them much more real and approachable. My students recognized several of the students from after school activities and it was nice for them to talk with them in a different context.
Thoughts re: Meeting February 17, 2010
I introduced the students to Wordle and the idea of using words as part of a design or as a piece of art. When I asked for a topic, one student piped up with, “Pancakes!” So I went to Wikipedia and copied the article on pancakes, which included several recipes. The word cloud is attached. They thought it was really cool to see all the words associated with pancakes and then to click to 
change the format. I set them loose with the only requirements that their work was appropriate for school and that they not browse through the gallery, because anyone can put in any words and not all words are appropriate for school. They were very good about that and enjoyed thinking of different topics to make word clouds. I was pleased to find that Jonathan Feinberg had arranged the home page to contain only G-rated work and provided with step by step instructions to make the site safely available to schools. Several of our projects are attached.Thoughts re Meetings January 6, January 20, and February 3, 2010
These three meetings we worked with the digital cameras and editing pictures. The first meeting, I showed them how to take pictures and we briefly discussed lighting. The basic rules, that the flash only lights up to a distance of 12 feet, and that the camera should not be facing into the sun, were the extent of the topic. After a reminder to be quiet for other after-school activities, they took pictures of each other and anything else they found interesting down the hall. The cameras are able to take pictures as close as three or four inches from the subject and we had very few out of focus pictures. They did better than I usually do with holding the camera still to avoid blurry pictures. The next meeting, I showed them how to open the pictures with Microsoft Picture Editor and work with several of the tools there. They learned these tools: Brightness and Contrast, Color, Crop, Rotate and Flip, and Red Eye Removal. By far the most popular was the Color tool. They experimented with changing the colors and how it changed the look of the picture. They did some interesting effects with changing colors and adjusting contrasts. Their favorite photograph was an owl and several experimented with changing the colors to great success. One student got into cropping and 
made a page full of eyes. He said it was going to be a bookmark. I guess he thought he could be looking at the book even when the book was closed! Several followed his example of cropping tightly around the owl's eyes. I have uploaded several samples. Another made an interesting effect by putting the red-eye removal tool repeatedly on his face and made a grey nose. I’m not sure what the point of that was, except that we all got a clear idea of how red-eye removal works. For our third meeting, the students wanted to continue with picture editing. Several hadn’t been able to attend the previous week and wanted to try editing; others hadn’t been able to print any pictures. The color printer is notoriously slow and seemed to be even stodgier when presented with the task of printing full color on several pages. We displayed our work in the hall and received many compliments.Thoughts re: Meeting December 2, 2009
The last meeting before the winter break we focused on the Publisher program and making greeting cards. I thought the boys might be a little reluctant to try this, but I was wrong. They enjoyed making cards and, with a few suggestions for personalizing them, they made several for special family members. I thought it was important that they make each card clearly individualized so that the recipient would know it was created just for him.To the right is one sample of a holiday card. Publisher formats the pages so that when it is folded horizontally and then vertically, all the pages are face up. This makes for a confusing bit of text boxes, as the students are typing the words in logical order but seeing them march up the side of the screen. This sample was printed on the black and white printer on accident, so I kept it and let the student reprint it in full color. (Don't tell anyone, though. All my students know that they must always click on Print Preview, to see that everything is perfect, because I never let them print twice. I just couldn't be a Scrooge and insist that he give a colorless card, so I kept the black and white copy for the blog.)
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Thoughts re: Meeting, 09.30.09
Today our meeting was small and fun. Many students were excused to attend musical speaking parts practice or to play in the fourth grade girls’ soccer game. First I introduced the students to the blog and explained that a blog is like an internet diary on a particular subject, in this case technology club meetings. They started to read my profile and were surprised that the information they read there was about my real life. ‘Look, Mrs. Shugan, you’re on the internet!’
Then I introduced the activity, which was taking apart some old computers that the technology department gave us. Having a small group was very helpful and I deliberately stepped back and let them discover how to take things apart, after cautioning them that they would need to put things back together at the end of the meeting. I asked them to see if they could name the parts as they were pulling them out. I set one of each pair to the task of finding an owner’s manual or a schematic to help us figure out what the parts are called. I was interested to see how well they would come up with good search terms to find this information. One of the students confidently announced that he would just Google it, and he had good results. However, initially skipping the Dell website, he selected sites that sell computer parts and do not show pictures of the parts, or show how they fit together in the computer case. I gave them few suggestions and I was happy to see that they easily found a drawing of the inside of the computer model they were working on. It had parts numbered and labeled and it was exactly what they needed to work well.
After they had put the parts back in and were lined up to go, I asked them what parts they had identified. They named: floppy disk drive, hard drive, internal speaker, motherboard, CD/DVD player, power supply, and the heat sink and blower. Next time, I think I will ask those students who know how to tear apart the computer to show the students who were absent today what they did. I will have them all find information on the internet to explain what the parts do. This will be a good opportunity to discuss effective search terms and to practice the skill of previewing the description and the web site address to assess its effectiveness. I want to do less explaining and let them do more experimenting than I would in a lesson. For tech club, the process is the lesson.
Then I introduced the activity, which was taking apart some old computers that the technology department gave us. Having a small group was very helpful and I deliberately stepped back and let them discover how to take things apart, after cautioning them that they would need to put things back together at the end of the meeting. I asked them to see if they could name the parts as they were pulling them out. I set one of each pair to the task of finding an owner’s manual or a schematic to help us figure out what the parts are called. I was interested to see how well they would come up with good search terms to find this information. One of the students confidently announced that he would just Google it, and he had good results. However, initially skipping the Dell website, he selected sites that sell computer parts and do not show pictures of the parts, or show how they fit together in the computer case. I gave them few suggestions and I was happy to see that they easily found a drawing of the inside of the computer model they were working on. It had parts numbered and labeled and it was exactly what they needed to work well.
After they had put the parts back in and were lined up to go, I asked them what parts they had identified. They named: floppy disk drive, hard drive, internal speaker, motherboard, CD/DVD player, power supply, and the heat sink and blower. Next time, I think I will ask those students who know how to tear apart the computer to show the students who were absent today what they did. I will have them all find information on the internet to explain what the parts do. This will be a good opportunity to discuss effective search terms and to practice the skill of previewing the description and the web site address to assess its effectiveness. I want to do less explaining and let them do more experimenting than I would in a lesson. For tech club, the process is the lesson.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Thoughts re: Meeting, 09.14.09
Yesterday was our first meeting. I wanted us to talk about internet safety first. We went to netsmartz.org and looked at a video this organization has prepared on it. We learned that there are no friends online. We never agree to meet with someone we have met online. We never give out personal information, name, phone number, hometown, school name, etc. If we ever feel unsure, uncomfortable, or icky about something we see, hear or read online, we should talk to a trusted adult like a parent or a teacher.
The students were surprised to hear that there are no friends online. One question was which of these would be ok to be your friend:
The person who writes, “I’m 12 years old and my favorite hobby is skateboarding. I love pizza and vanilla ice cream.”
The person who writes, “What is you phone number; where do you live?”
The person who writes, “Would you like to buy a game; what is your parent’s credit card number?”
They generally agreed that the first one would be ok to be a friend on the internet and the video made a nice point of saying that could really be a guy who is much older and who is pretending to be young like you so you will be more open and trusting of him.
This is the address, if you would like to explore yourself: http://www.netsmartz.org/index.aspx
Several of the students (mostly boys) asked if they could go on favorite websites like funbrain, webkins, and primary games. I explained that this is a school sponsored activity and we would be primarily learning, along with exploring new technology, getting deeper into some of the programs than we have time to in class and maybe having a little fun along the way. They were amazed when I told them Mr. N., the computer teacher at another school in our district, has had a tech club for the past four or five years and that he let them tear apart an old computer. I will definitely put that on the schedule.
The students were surprised to hear that there are no friends online. One question was which of these would be ok to be your friend:
The person who writes, “I’m 12 years old and my favorite hobby is skateboarding. I love pizza and vanilla ice cream.”
The person who writes, “What is you phone number; where do you live?”
The person who writes, “Would you like to buy a game; what is your parent’s credit card number?”
They generally agreed that the first one would be ok to be a friend on the internet and the video made a nice point of saying that could really be a guy who is much older and who is pretending to be young like you so you will be more open and trusting of him.
This is the address, if you would like to explore yourself: http://www.netsmartz.org/index.aspx
Several of the students (mostly boys) asked if they could go on favorite websites like funbrain, webkins, and primary games. I explained that this is a school sponsored activity and we would be primarily learning, along with exploring new technology, getting deeper into some of the programs than we have time to in class and maybe having a little fun along the way. They were amazed when I told them Mr. N., the computer teacher at another school in our district, has had a tech club for the past four or five years and that he let them tear apart an old computer. I will definitely put that on the schedule.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)