Avatarring Part 2

How slack have I been!!! I must make a conscious effort to try and blog more regularly! Anyway here are some of the Avatars that I promised I would post. The kids had a blast doing them, and even though they took longer than anticipated I think they are worth it. We did actually insert a background behind them but I think they look better without the background, this way you can see warts and all...not that my kids are warty!!! You know what I mean!

I Pad I Sad I'm afraid it's just a Fad

Got my hands on an Ipad a few weeks ago. I guess I am being a bit harsh in my blog title. Granted it is very flash and looks pretty, but I had to try and look past all the flashiness and see if there would be any educational benefits to it and whether we should think about purchasing some. I imediately saw possibilities for it in the class, it's lightweight, very portable, easy to use, (the kids who used it just took off with it!) and there are a wide variety of applications available for it. I loved how you can see the fullweb page and the responsiveness it impressive. I hate how it does not run flash and that to me is a real deal breaker. A lot of the work and activities we do in class revolves around Flash and if the Ipad can't (or won't) do it then I see no point. I guess it was designed for consuming instead of creating. I didn't really get a chance to look at its networking capabilites but I tried to send some files via bluetooth which didn't work. Campbell live had an interesting look (although very quick) at Ipads the other day, and the guy who was on basically said they are for "consuming, not creating" which is great but not so great in the class if you want to create something!

Avatarring

Just a quick update to let all those people who read my blog...(me and possibly one other person...) know what we are up to. GIMPing is the project at hand, and in particular Avatarring ourselves. It's a pretty involved process but the kids seem to be enjoying it. It has been a bit of a chore showing each step though...the plan was to hook up the laptop to the projector but unfortunately the new macbooks have a different port for the VGA cable and since they are student laptops they don' t come supplied with the cable! SO it was a case of gather round, gather round, but oh well worked anyway. Most of the kids have picked it up quickly, the hardest challenge being the layers and keeping track of where they are and how many of them there are!

I will post more when we are finished but here is an example of what we are doing. (Still not happy with the nose....will have to sort that out!)

Text your eyes ow

Haven't posted for a while , the class is still manic but we are getting there, not so many glitches which actually makes teaching a lot easier! Anyway, here are some examples of our acrostic poems that we made using a program called Textorizer http://lapin-bleu.net/software/textorizer/. There were several steps involved. Step 1 was to take a photo of themselves using Photobooth. Step 2 was to write an acrostic poem using their first name. The idea was to repeat the poem several times, so a bit of copying and pasting was involved, then they had to convert it to a text file (so textorizer could use it). Once all these things were done (and saved!) they could move onto Step 3 which involved uploading the photo and the text file to textorizer. Once there the children could fiddle around with the various settings. You can change the size of the lines, saturation, font, etc etc, so when they were happy with the result they took a screen clipping of the final result (this seems to work better than saving, as the picture comes out a bit blurry). The final step....whew! Put the screen clipped picture into comiclife and present it. A lot to take in but we were pretty happy with the final results. I also used the recorder tool that comes with Mimiostudio to record all the steps I took to make one, so if the children needed to review what to do they could just go into the server and see what to do. Here are 2 of the videos (one was too big to upload) if you want to see what I am talking about.

And here are some of the finished products

 

A new start..also known as "WHAT HAVE I DONE!!!?????"

So back into the swing of things, day 6 of school (although it feels like week 6!) and our digital classroom is all go! To be honest it is incredibly manic, the children are coping well and they are picking things up quickly which helps as I find myself going at full speed and there has been no easing in period.  At this stage I can see that my work load is going to be fairly heavy until the class becomes used to using laptops and ICT more and more. Luckily most of them have a good grounding in the basics! Here are a couple of examples of what we are doing so far.

After reading The Cave of the One Eyed Giant and analysing the character of the Cyclops the children made up a wanted poster using comiclife and photobooth. To begin with Children used the Mirror effect on Photobooth to create a photo of themselves as the cyclops, after a few attempts the children were able to line themselves up and make one eye! They then sent the photo to the student disk where I deleted the background using photoshop (I think it's a bit early in the term to get the kids on photoshop!) They then went to kidpix to find an environment for their cyclops to stand in front of, dark forest, cave etc. After screen clipping the background they then layout all the elements on comiclife and finally added their cyclops!

Here are a few of the hideous creations!

Wow!!!! What an awesome assembly we just had! I was so proud of Room 7, they did such a great job with the item and seeing the response from the rest of the school was worth all the hard work that we put in. All the children who spoke did an excellent job and the random jokes worked well....except the one by Meg. Grrrrrrr I'll get her back! 

Here are a few photos.

     

Wallwisher

Room 7s Wall by Brent

Just had a bit of a fiddle with wallwisher (click the link above). It's a bulletin board application where you can post sticky notes. Not quite sure what sort of other areas you could use it in yet, but I set a task for the children to go onto the board and post their opinions about digital classrooms. They are limited by the amount of characters they can use (160) so it becomes an interesting exercise in editing! For a first time run through, not a bad effort, some children have come up with some interesting opinions, but I can see that with more exploration wallwisher could be worthwhile!