Mobile Learning Series: Overgram for great title slides...and poetry!

Overgram is a free app that I've been using for awhile on my iPhone because it can quickly add info or even humor to some of the pictures that I share through Twitter, Flickr, or even that I just text to friends. As an added bonus (for the Instagram crowd) they can also be shared through Instragram.  I recently loaded Overgram onto my students' iPads.

Beginning to use QR Codes - some quick ideas

I'll admit QR codes were a bit of a mystery to me until recently.  I've seen the funny little codes in magazines and advertisements, and I understood that if you had an app on your phone you could scan them and get...somewhere.  Beyond that I didn't give them much thought. However, it seems I've been reading about them everywhere recently and they really can have some practical uses - even in the classroom.

The first thing I did was get a free QR reader app for my iPhone - I got one called Qrafter.

This app is pretty basic - touch it, hold your phone over a code and it automatically scans and takes you to the site.  Handy. I read an article that talked about how easy it was to generate your own QR codes for a website - another free app called QR Code Maker (for iPad on iTunes).  It's a little glitchy, but when you put in a URL it will generate a nice code every single time.  You don't need an app or a mobile device to generate codes - you can make them for free online at many sites. I made a code for my class blog page, which is my central site for all of my courses.  I printed it out on a big page and hung it on my classroom door.

Then I decided that since those apps were free (and easy), I'd put them on my middle school students' iPads - also easy.  The kids had seen the codes before.  The first thing they did was use the reader on my code I'd put by the door. That was the extent of that learning curve.

A few weeks ago the kids had done some art projects - in the process they documented their work with pictures and video, and later narrated their process and edited these to make personal art documentaries.  They had posted these short films on their blogs.  The finished artwork is hanging up in my classroom.  The students went to the blog posts they'd made of their documentaries and used the URL's to make QR codes on their new iPad app, QR Code Maker.  They printed out small codes, and tacked them to the side of their artwork.  Now the students with their iPads, and visitors with phone scanners, can scan the code next to their artwork and connect immediately to a video the students created which documents the process they went through in creating that piece of art.

WHY SHOULD YOU TRY THIS? This can be a great way to "go deeper" into student work - especially when they are working on projects that may involve skills, performance and various creations.  QR codes are a simple link that can help a student put physical and virtual elements together.  They can bring the depth of a project to a virtual and a physical audience.

My middle school students are currently working on a research project in which they are using some old photos displayed in the school and creating web pages about those photos that expand the information with their research.  They will create QR's for those pages that we can attach to the photos in the hall.  Visitors to our school will then have a way of learning more about the old photographs and our local history.

In the meantime, the kids are really getting into generating codes for their blogs - maybe a little overboard...

The Classroom Camera

Although your classroom may be tech-poor, chances are you can gain access to at least 1 digital camera - even if it is your own - even if it's just a cell phone camera! Although more would make certain things a little easier, one is really all you need to do a lots of great things! There are some activities that can be done as a class and the teacher takes the pictures, and some where you could group the students and then easily stagger their picture taking time. What kinds of great things can you do? The things that make learning more personal, engaging, and visual for your students. So for the purposes of this blog (the need to get tech ideas in a sec), we'll keep our list short.

1. Visualize the spelling/vocabulary list for the week. For elementary students, this can be a fast but fun activity. Put the list of words up and talk about them a little. You can ask the students to show what a word means through some kind of pose, use of props or other creative means. Take a picture! Do that for all of the words on the list. This picture activity not only visually documents the students' interpretation of the words, but the act of "acting out" or visualizing the meaning of the words is an activity that will help the students to better learn the words. You can print out the pictures and post them by the list, or load them into a simple PowerPoint that your run on your overhead projector whenever you do a review of the words. Students can see the pictures and then use their own paper or mini dry erase boards to guess and spell the words. Lots of fun - especially when the students themselves are in the pictures!

2. For older students, split up a word list - and give a pair or threesome of students their word group. Let them take the camera and get a shot of their own interpretation of the words (they will have to discover the definitions on their own). Either print the pictures or project them. Have other students guess what the word is - or have the students who took the picture give clues or describe the meanings. This often becomes a contest about creativity among the students - figuring out the most interesting way to interpret a word visually.

3. Picture scavenger hunts - especially useful when teaching an abstract concept, like "democracy". Students can use the camera to set up a scene that is meant to capture a key concept like equality, majority rule with minority rights, etc. This is a great way to teach students to think metaphorically as well, and modeling for them ways that a simple visual image can convey many ideas without being literal.

4. Story board planning - really fun for group stories! Set up a story board for students to work with (individuals or groups could easily do this). Have students plan their plot, characters, and scenes by using photographs. The story boards can be digital - in Comic Life (installed on all teacher Macs), or even on a simple slide show like PowerPoint, or Google Presentations. The story boards could also just be a large chart of paper - pictures could be printed in black and white and tacked up onto the story board. Students can visualize points of plot, characters, and order. There are also tons of great online digital storytelling tools if you want to go that route, like Storybird, Picture Book Maker, or Kerpoof, just to name a few.

5. Summarizing - learning to summarize the key points of a story or piece of information is an important skill for students. Summarizing using a picture or two can help more visual students hone this skill. After reading a chapter in a book or a section or scene in a story, ask the students to come up with an idea for a scene that would capture the essence of the message.

The great thing about using photos this way in the classroom is that you can have a lot of fun discussions modeling how pictures can tell many stories. Put together a simple PowerPoint for the projector and fill it just with images that you can discuss with the students. Google Images, Flickr, and Picasa are fantastic sources of crowd-sourced pictures that you can easily narrow down by category. Select a set that you think would make for a great discussion (depending on what you are teaching - i.e. summarizing, metaphorical representations) and just drag those photos to your slide show - no need to type any text. Or, you can even snap your own photos of people and places the kids know around town or the school for the same effect. This makes even a modeling lesson engaging and lively!

EdTechSec Podcasts #1

Gabcast! EdTechSec Podcasts #1



*WOW! For any of you who have ever made even one podcast, or any of you who have ever made just 1 blog post, you can attest to how easy it is - they are the kinds of things that once you do them you go, "Hey, that was a lot easier than I thought it would be!". Well for those of you who have ever taken that just one step further and put put an mp3(sound) file on your blog - still, the feeling is, "Hey, that was not hard at all!".

Those were my reactions to all of those things when I first learned them. They are now operations that take me literally only seconds to do.

Well, today my world just got a little easier with Gabcast! This section I am posting (beginning with the asterisk) was my own addition to a post CREATED FOR ME with Gabcast. I made that call, said my message, crossed my fingers then came to this site. And here it was - posted and ready to go. This is the easiest blog post AND podcast I have ever made - I think I could get to like this!

A physics interactive to challenge all levels

Fantastic Contraption is a web interactive where your challenge is to build a machine from simple parts to move objects to a goal. Yes - physics is the main focus of this activity but anyone (even teachers) can test, test, and re-try with this! There is a short tutorial that explains the simple parts and what they do and explains the objective (move your machine to the pink box). The controls are easy to manipulate and you will find yourself building a Fantastic Contraption before you know it.

Fantastic Contraption is a great tool for elementary students studying simple machines - you can easily incorporate the concepts into this interactive play. There are endless levels, so even more advanced students in physics will find ample challenges.

If you choose to register (you don't have to) you can save your levels of play and your devices and share them on the site, as well as seeing what others have done - there is no one right way to complete the objective!
For those students or teachers who have an iPhone or iPod Touch, Fantastic Contraption is available as an app for $4.99. Try it out online for free first.