Music in Me GarageBand Project
Monday I helped a teacher introduce a Music in Me project inspired by @DOREMIGIRL. For this project each student was asked to find five songs which hold significant meaning in the student's life. Using GarageBand, students will provide an introduction for each song, along with an explanation of why the chosen song is meaningful to them. Students will then insert a 30 second sample of the song before moving to the next selection. The students were quite excited about the opportunity to express themselves through the use of music. Introducing this project at the start of the year is a good way for a teacher to learn about each student, and for students to learn about fellow classmates. I look forward to hearing the completed projects.Willow Awards Book Trailer Project
Because our school division has adopted a system-wide BYOT policy, students are allowed to use personal devices to connect to the student Wi-Fi network (with parent consent and teacher permission). This means a student would be able to enter the library with an iPod, smartphone, or tablet, pick a book off the shelf, scan the QR code and instantly watch a book trailer for the book they are considering signing out from the library. If successful, it would be great to expand this project to include more books and more libraries. QR codes could also be used to provide students with a chance to try sample AR questions before taking an AR quiz.
Personal Memoire VoiceThread Project
Friday afternoon I was asked to help two Grade 7/8 classrooms begin a personal memoire project using VoiceThread. My use of VoiceThread has been minimal, and I have never used the Education version, so this project provided me with some great learning experiences. The students had no prior knowledge of VoiceThread, so the introduction lesson was a good opportunity to discuss the idea of online collaboration. It also gave us the opportunity to reinforce positive digital citizenship skills and prompted a discussion on how to comment appropriately on other students' projects. I am always amazed at how quickly and easily students begin using a new program. This is another project I will be closely monitoring over the upcoming weeks.If anyone else has experience in similar projects, I would be happy for any advice or comments.
Dean - I love that second project of creating book trailers. I've used iMovie trailers with younger students (Grade 3s), and they loved the experience. Are the students using iMovie itself, or the trailer creator? Not sure if it's been updated, but when I was using the trailer creator, it was difficult to include still images (like what you'd get from Creative Commons) without actually filming the still images to turn them into videos (which seemed kind of counterintuitive). Could you also get students to act out parts of the book? That might be a cool addition.
ReplyDeleteHi Katia. The Macbooks the students are using have the 2009 version of iMovie. This version does not contain the trailer creator. I have used the trailer creator for other projects, but find it to be a bit limiting, especially since narration can not be added. Good suggestion with acting out parts of the book. I will have to consider it.
DeleteGreat project ideas Dean! As a middle years teacher who would like to integrate more technology into my classroom, these are helpful. I, like Katia, especially like your second project. Our school does a project around the Willow books, but just for the primary kids. This is a way that I could incorporate them into the middle years. Unfortunately, we do not have Macs to use iMovie. Do you have any other suggestions of program I could try? Does each student make a trailer for each book? Or do you have them work in groups?
ReplyDeleteHi Valerie,
DeleteOne program I have used on PCs with students is PhotoStory. I believe it is a free download (we have it on our system computers). PhotoStory allows the creator to insert pictures and to add text or narration to each picture. Another option would be Movie Maker. Movie Maker is generally used for creating video projects, but it also allows for the insertion of still images. I believe it is also a free download.