Thoughts re: Meeting March 24, 2010

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!

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.

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.)