Tip of the Iceberg

Dear Mr ______

I was dismayed to see that a blog post I had written – 10 Great Ways to use Audacity with your Students – had been reproduced on your website verbatim. What makes it worse, is that you have made it seem as if my content was your own:

I am sure you can appreciate that as the author of Tip of the Iceberg, I spend a lot of time and energy creating blog posts which I feel will be useful for the readers of my blog. To have my post effectively  stolen, is extremely frustrating, particularly when your website stands to gain from the content of the material posted (I see Google advertisements at the end of the plagiarized post).

It makes me wonder how many other posts you have on your website that were actually written by other authors. A quick Google search of your ‘recent posts’ leads me to draw my own conclusions…

As an educator, I spend a great deal of time helping my students to understand that they cannot just copy other people’s work and pass it off as their own. Even students as young as 7 and 8 can understand this concept, and are able to attribute the work they source appropriately.

I am a great believer in Creative Commons, and have no problem with other people referring to my blog posts or quoting from them, provided they are referenced correctly. However as you made no attempt to seek my permission, or reference me as the author of the post, I request that you remove it from your site immediately.

I suggest you take the time to familiarize yourself with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) to ensure issues such as this do not plague you in the future.

Sincerely,

Keri-Lee Beasley.

UPDATE 23rd July 2010:

I have since received  a very genuine email from the gentleman in question, who apologised sincerely, and has now credited me as author of the post on his website. I appreciate my correspondence with him, and hope that this serves as a learning experience for all of us.

Most issues such as these can be resolved relatively easily.

I would also like to thank members of my PLN for their support in this matter. A better bunch I could not find!

I am currently in Shepparton, Victoria, eagerly awaiting the start of the Slide2Learn conference tomorrow morning.

During my trip, I have been thinking about how much I rely on technology for my travel plans, and how much of a challenge it would be for me to go somewhere without it.

Here is a list of the technology I used to get from my door to the hotel in Shepparton.

1. My trusty iPhone – this is fast becoming my most crucial piece of technology. I seldom go anywhere without it. It is so much more than just a phone, with apps like these:

I used the fabulous (and free) Tripit to input all my travel arrangements – from flights, to rental cars and hotel confirmations. I didn’t print the majority of these documents. Generally speaking, I just held up the phone to show the relevant information. Easy as pie.

Dropbox stored my passport details, entrance tickets to the conference, and other information that is essential to have close at hand, no matter where you are.

Pocket First Aid & CPR has my medical insurance details, should any tragic circumstances ensue (I have my fingers crossed they won’t!), as well as first aid information that might help in an emergency.

Angry Birds & Sudoku – my current diversions, are entertainment in my pocket.

Hipstamatic helps me create moody, artistic photographs that I can share with friends and family (reaching a level of sophistication well beyond the realms of my normal creativity!) – the photo to the right was taken using Hipstamatic, and is the view from the Olivehouse Restaurant, where I had a delicious lunch today.

Just Light Flashlight – my torch in the night

XE Currency - calculating exchange rates at the touch of a button is always a useful tool when overseas.

Facebook & Tweetdeck for keeping in touch with friends and family, near and far.

2. GPS – Without which, I would have quite literally, been lost. Traveling in an unfamiliar location is tricky at the best of times, and using the sat-nav to get to my destination took all of the worry out of my drive from Melbourne to Shepparton.

3. My iPod Touch – by no means a superfluous piece of technology when one already has an iPhone! I consider myself pretty handy with technology these days, yet for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to make the radio in my rental car go. I needed to make sure I didn’t run out of battery on my phone, and a 2 hour trip goes by ever-so-slowly without a little music to sing to… cue the iPod Touch! It sat happily on the dash, belting out my Glee favourites as we moseyed along the Victorian countryside.

4. My (aging) Macbook Pro – Although I realise this is beginning to sound like an advertisement for all things Apple, it was not my intention! The fact of the matter is they make good products! What the Macbook Pro lacks in portability, it makes up for in ease of use – particularly for blogging on the go. It is always quick and easy to connect to wireless networks too.

5. Skype – It would be remiss of me not to mention Skype as a travel tool, as I use it so frequently. I said goodnight to my kids tonight, saw the artwork my daughter had made, chatted to my husband, and made my son laugh. All for free (internet connection notwithstanding).

Technology I made use of at Changi Airport included a DIY immigration, where your thumb is scanned and matched against records in your Green Card. At the Melbourne end, NZ and Australian passport holders could use a fast track service in which you scan your passport (provided it has a microchip in it) and beat the queues at immigration. Thumbs up to these 2 leading airports!

Of course Bump is going to be useful tomorrow – especially at a conference about mobile learning!

I am sure I have forgotten some crucial tools here. What are your tech travel must-haves? I am keen to expand my repertoire…!

It was a great privilege to attend the awards ceremony of the inaugural Singapore International School Film Fest last night. Singapore is certainly home to some talented, creative and artistic students – watch out Peter Jackson!

Established to offer students the chance to showcase their creative ideas, talent and skills through film, the SISFF received more than 100 entries. Films were entered in one of four categories – Public Service Announcement, Video Art, Narrative and Documentary – across Primary, Middle and High School age groups. Students came from a range of international schools, which gave them a unique opportunity to share and exchange great ideas while being immersed in global and multicultural experiences.

I had the pleasure of working on the committee, and through my involvement got to meet a whole lot of new and interesting people. It was a really great experience, and I can’t wait to get going on next year’s festival.

I am proud to announce that one of my Grade 5 students – Jean-Luc – won the technical award for Best Animation, which, considering his entry came from a project I considered one of my failures, was the icing on the cake for me!

I hope you enjoy the top 3 winners as much as I do:

Best in Show

1st Runner up

2nd Runner up (reminiscent of Flight of the Conchords)

I have to also include the winner of Best Cinematography, as it’s such a visually stunning film

And last, but by no means least, Jean-Luc’s winning entry for Best Animation

Here are a list of apps I’m exploring in my workshop for Apple on Leveraging Learning with the iPod Touch.


Doodle Kids
Free
Neat little app created by a 9 year old Singaporean boy. We’ve used it for fine motor skills, creativity etc. You can take screen shots of your creations and email them later.

Flower Garden
$1.99
Neat little app where you plant, water and grow flowers and send bouquets via email.
_

Sonic Pics
$2.99
Fantastically versatile app for narrating over your own images. Either upload images to your photo gallery, or take screenshots to use. This app creates a video of your slideshow which you can email, send to your computer or upload to YouTube.


Number Line
Free
Excellent little app for ordering decimals, percentages and fractions. Would suit middle to upper primary.

iChoose
Free
App which allows you to select from coin toss, yes/no, dice roll, card choice, rock/paper/scissors and many other options. Great for probability and statistics.

Math Quizzer
Free
Choose from addition, subtraction, multiplication & division (or a combination of these) and then complete the questions. Multi-choice answers are provided below.

Step Trak Lite
Free
Neat app which acts as a pedometer. Simple to use, really effective. You can upload your results to MapMyWalk.
_-

abc Pocket Phonics
$0.99
I think this is a great little app for the early years. You learn to form letters, hear the sounds of each letter, then blend sounds to make words at the end. The Lite version has the first sounds only, but the full version has sound blends as well. Give it a go! See here for more details on how we used with with K2.

Early Reader
$0.99
Another app for beginning readers. It covers the basic sight words, phonics, etc and is easy to use. You can turn the voice on or off.

-

KT-Dict CE
Free
Chinese-English dictionary. See here for more details on how we use it at school.

-

Word Magic
$0.99
This app has missing letters which the kids need to select from a list to complete the word. There are a range of settings you can customize, including lowercase or uppercase letters, the missing letters at the beginning, middle or end of the word, and the length of the word (to name but a few).

I will also be looking at the Voice Memo app, which comes preloaded on all iPod Touch and iPhones.


Art
$0.99
Great list of historical artists, their lives, their art, and so much more. If $0.99 seems a little much, why not try the lite version, which is free.

The Muscle System Pro
$19.99
High quality images of the Muscular system, perfect for kids to take screencaptures to use in presentations.
-

The Skeletal System Pro
$19.99

High quality images of the Skeletal system, which students can screencapture, making this app money well spent for inquiries relating to the human body.

Google Earth
Free
Excellent iPod Touch version of the desktop programme created by Google. Absolutely awesome.

I’m sure you will already know about DropBox, but in case you have been
a) hiding under a rock
b) without internet access
c) a parent of very small children
or some other tragic circumstance has prevented you from discovering its brilliance, here are the details just in case:

DropBox is a wonderful service which allows you to store files in the ‘cloud’ and sync them across multiple computers and devices automatically.

Some of its free features include:

• 2GB storage
• Public, Private and Shared folders
• Restore previous versions of your files
• Download files for offline viewing
• Mobile access
• Export files to other applications

For the paid service, you get up to 100GB of storage- it’s pretty amazing really!

Some of the ways I have used DropBox include:

• Storing copies of my family’s passport details, so when trying to book flights from different computers, all the information is handy.
• Sharing photos from events & conferences.
• Working on common files for workshops.
• Safeguarding important documents I cannot afford to lose.

So if you haven’t signed up for a DropBox account, you should do so – today!

During the Asia ADE Institute 2010, Improv expert Rebecca Stockley introduced the “Failure Bow” as a way of recognising failures as learning opportunities. Basically, if you stuffed up, you held your hands up and everyone applauded your failures (rather than only celebrating your successes).

I love the idea of this, but putting it into practice is something that takes a bit of getting used to. Admitting defeat is not something we tend to do, but I don’t want this blog to become a show-boat of lessons that have gone well without countering it with some of the lessons that haven’t. So here goes:

I stuffed up.

Overall, I think it would be safe to describe my Grade 5 animation project as a bit of a disaster. And that’s if you’re being kind.

The ingredients for success were all there: enthusiastic students, willing and supportive colleagues, the necessary equipment – but several contributing factors meant that the end result just didn’t cut the mustard. Instead of detailing the list of things that went wrong (there is only so much time in the day after all…!), I thought I’d share the lessons I learned through my failures.

Lesson 1. Large photo files + network + 22 students all on the computers = frustration. I wanted to use good quality images to get the best quality for the finished product, however with the scale we were working with (in excess of 300 photos each group), Movie Maker crashed more times that I’ve had hot dinners.
To solve this problem, next year I would reduce the file size to Large or even Medium, to speed the process up, and reduce the chance of crashing.

Lesson 2. Storing video/image files on local machines is much better than accessing files via the school network. I know this seems obvious, but when you have kids using different computers all the time (and occasionally different computers being out of action for some reason), then the network seems like the safest bet. For videos of this magnitude, storing files locally makes the whole thing run much more smoothly.

Lesson 3. Having 22 kids at a time making movies is great in theory, but, practically speaking, 1 per group would have been more manageable for the network. I thought that groups could work together to create and shoot their images, then take the images and edit their a movie individually. One movie per group would be fine, however clear guidelines for each group member would need to be established, so that everyone is responsible for different sections.

Lesson 4. Know your software. Despite making short test versions of animations (as outlined here), Movie Maker wasn’t up for the task on a larger scale. Our other software, Adobe Premiere Elements is a great tool, but the smallest picture duration we could customize it to was 1 frame per second (not nearly fast enough for a decent animation). While trying to fiddle around with the picture duration settings, I discovered Adobe Premiere Elements had a stop-motion animation function (if used with a webcam connected to the computer) which we could have used from the beginning. The quality of the finished movie wouldn’t be as great, however if it meant more kids would be successful in creating an animation, then it’s probably worth trying.

Lesson 5. Persistence pays off. With the Singapore International School Film Festival kicking off in a few short days, I woke at 1am in despair at how despite all the hard work from teachers and students alike, I had not even one video to submit to the Film Fest for consideration. It was heartbreaking. I lay awake for ages composing this blog post in my head. The very next day, one of the students managed to pull together his fabulous animation ready for submission, just in the nick of time. Where other students had given up, Jean-Luc showed an impressive amount of tenacity to keep coming back to the lab, even though each change involved a 10 minute load time, then the distinct possibility of Movie Maker crashing. I am so proud to share this video with you:

Photo Credit: ToGa Wanderings

If you’re anything like me, you will recall the hype surrounding Google Wave, and you will remember with excitement, the day your invite finally arrived.

I felt a bit like the cat that got the cream when I got mine, however my Wave potential was limited by the number of geeks people I could interact with (I had no invites for ages!). I felt it would be a wonderful tool for use in the classroom, but my initial lack of invites put the kibosh on that!

Fast forward 6 months and my Google Wave account was gathering virtual dust in cyberspace.

As good fortune would have it, my husband and I met up with an old friend in Bali – Werner Paetzold – from Bali International School on our holidays in April. Werner was singing the praises of Google Wave, and said he used it quite successfully with his Middle School students. There was a challenge, if ever I heard one!

He told me about the newest extensions, and also extolled the virtues of Google Wave as a conference note-taking platform. At the recent IBO conference, wireless was at something of a premium, but Werner insisted that if he opened the Wave when he had wireless, and left it open, he could happily take notes throughout the conference, and when he returned to wireless connectivity, it would sync all his notes for him.

The upcoming Grade 5 PYP Exhibition sounded like the perfect opportunity to have a look at what Wave could do.

I am mentor to two groups for the Exhibition (a unit that is a really student-driven inquiry, with mentor support), so I invited one member of each group, and they subsequently used their invitations to invite the rest of their group members. I asked them to start a Wave as a way of collaboratively collecting resources and research for their Exhibition. I love the grade 5 kids, they really are a fantastic bunch, so it was no surprise that they took to Google Wave like ducks to water.

Here are 5 reasons I believe you should dust off your Google Wave account and invite your students:

1. Collaboration - Google Wave allows for very easy collaboration. It is very similar to both email and instant messaging, which are mediums that are extremely familiar to the kids I work with. Adding contacts to a Wave is… well… child’s play! I asked the students to invite me to their Wave, meaning I get all the updates as they work. It is a great way of having all the students’ research in one place – a place which is easily accessible at home and at school.

2. Playback - not sure who has contributed to the Wave lately? Or keen to see how the interaction is playing out with your students? Hit Playback, and you’ll see a sped up replay of the editing to date. This is useful as a way of tracking  involvement, but also a good way to catch up if you have been invited to a Wave fairly late in the piece.

3. Real-time Editing – my students think this part of Wave is uber cool – and it IS! There is something mind-blowing about the ability to see exactly what someone else is typing the moment they press the keypad. No more waiting until a person has finished his/her sentence – you can answer a question as it is being formed.
Pretty powerful stuff. Reason number 3 leads directly into reason number 4…

4. Just-in-Time support – on several occasions, I have been online at home when the kids have been working on their research. One time, I was able to give some immediate feedback and suggestions on a student’s just-completed Prezi, another time I explained how to embed a website into the Wave using one of the Extensions. It has been a fabulous tool for this sort of interaction.

5. Extensions - in my opinion, one of the best things about using Google Wave is the fabulous Extensions that are now available. Without the extensions, Wave is like an iPod Touch without the apps – cool, but not quite cool enough! I have pulled out a couple of the great Extensions that I have found useful so far:

iFRAME – this Extension allows you to embed a website into your Wave so others can read/preview it from within the Wave, and not have to leave the window.

Ferry – a way of exporting waves to Google Docs and other formats

How have you used Google Wave in the classroom? Any bright ideas to share? Any must-have Extensions? I am keen to hear your feedback!

Google Wave image credit: curiouslee

Update May 26th 2010: Lessons Learned

Thanks to a comment from a reader, I was alerted to the Terms of Service for Google Wave, which state:

“2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google,” (http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS)

I hadn’t realised I had overlooked this section of the Terms of Service (TOS) – and took steps to rectify it immediately.

I had originally invited the kids using their school-controlled Gmail account via Google Apps, but when the students discovered those addresses weren’t accepted by Google Wave (at that time), they used their own accounts (which they already had outside of school).

As Google Wave is now available via Google Apps for Education, I informed the students of the issue, and had them create a replacement Wave account using their school-controlled Gmail account. They still have access to the wonderfully collaborative features of Wave, but without the extensions (at this point). The only loss to us is the <iframe> extension, which allows websites to be embedded in a wave. A very nice feature indeed.

My intention is, and has always been, to connect students to technology that enhances their learning. Although I sincerely regret not checking the terms of service more thoroughly, this has turned into a valuable learning opportunity for us all.

I regularly discuss the importance of Internet awareness with my students, and this has given us another opportunity to bring these issues to the fore, and ensure students can learn from this, as I have.

The key issue is the US laws relating to COPPA/CIPA and one aspect of that is the legal age at which people can engage in a contract.  This is the same thing that has plagued Ning use in elementary schools.  There seems to be agreement that the legal age is 14 in the States — though in California where Google is incorporated, the legal age is 18.  Here in Singapore it is 21.

I would be interested to hear from someone with legal knowledge and an international school perspective.

I remain convinced that Google Wave is an outstanding platform for student use, and hope you see the benefits too.

Our K2 Team have been at it again! They continue to actively look at new ways of integrating technology into their programme.

Teaching about non-standard measurement is one of the K2 Maths expectations, and Louise & Andrea had the inspired idea of using the pedometer app StepTrakLite on the iPod Touch to make it more interesting for their students.

Andrea created a recording sheet for them, and had them estimate the distance (in steps) from one place to another, then check it using StepTrakLite. Louise got her kids to make their own recording sheet. Both approaches worked brilliantly, and the kids had a great time. Here is Andrea’s recording sheet:

Measuring With StepTrakLite Using iPod Touches

Here’s a video of the kids excitedly measuring their steps using StepTrakLite

Every now and then I think it’s character building to step outside your comfort zone and try something you wouldn’t normally try. That’s what I kept telling myself – repeatedly - having made the decision to take on Stop-Motion Animation.

Luckily for me, people who have far more patience than I were on hand to help.

For starters, @beckcollect gave me some great ideas on how to begin, and kindly shared the Animation Stage plans he used, together with some student examples.

I found a partner-in-crime in Margot (@togramann, our wonderful Art teacher), who was also willing to have a go at this in a combined project. Finally, we found (read: strongly convinced) the Grade 5 team to let us use their students as our figurative crash-test-dummies.

Grade 5 were doing a unit on inquiry called Voices, with the following enduring  understanding (Central Idea in PYP-speak) as its focus:

Through the Arts we tell our stories of who we are: our beliefs, our values and our experiences of life.

Our idea was to animate Aboriginal Dreamtime stories using Stop-Motion Animation, which we had hoped to narrate (however think we’ll just add title slides with the main story elements instead).

In Art, the students painted the backgrounds and foregrounds for the project and created the characters of their story out of plasticine.

In the ICT Lab, we had a practice run by learning to animate a sketched character and adding music to the background, to prepare for our final project, which will be animating the characters across the background and foregrounds they have constructed in Art.

Here is an example of our first-try animations, made by Al.

Thankfully our estates staff helped build the Animation Stages using recycled materials. They were fantastic! We ordered new digital still cameras (we went with this model) and adjustable lamps (we tried these ones, but they were a bit tricky to use).

We are now in the final stages of the project, and I have high hopes that some of the kids will be finished in time to enter their movie into the inaugural Singapore International Schools Film Festival.

Stay tuned…

Comfort zone image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/434pics/ / CC BY 2.0

This tweet from @pluke17 got me thinking…

He shared a link to this photo of his son Declan’s art work:

I thought it was a pretty amazing drawing, and I was equally impressed that this 11-year-old had found something he wanted to learn and knew exactly where to find the information that would help him.

I personally use YouTube a lot for learning all sorts of things, including new recipes, using new software, and looking for help with existing software. I remember when I first discovered how useful it was – it was a revelation!

I put the call out on Twitter to see what sorts of things other people were learning, and I got lots of interesting responses:

This is just a sample of the suggestions my PLN came up with – the Tip of the Iceberg (if you will excuse the pun).

It’s obvious great self-directed learning is happening at home for many people, but are our students, parents and teachers aware of what can be learned through YouTube?

Jeff and Kim at ISB had parents search ‘how to’ videos on YouTube for things they were interested in during a parent workshop on Social Networking. What a great way of informing parents about the potential uses of YouTube!

It would be great to see students have an opportunity to use YouTube to help further their learning in a variety of areas too. There are videos about spelling rules, times tables, taking action, learning French, learning the recorder, learning punctuation, how to cook, throwing a rugby ball, how to draw cartoons, how to make stop motion animation… The list goes on. Why aren’t we encouraging kids explore ways to help themselves?

I suspect people are worried students might come across an inappropriate video in their quest for quality information. Even though this may occur in some instances, I feel it is a perfect learning opportunity for students. Two questions immediately spring to mind that I would ask the students before they even touched the computers:

1. What should you do if you come across something that makes you feel uncomfortable?
2. How can the careful selection of keywords help you find the most relevant content?

Here are some other ways YouTube has been used in classroom settings:

• Our Grade 2 students inquired into the origins of food products for their unit From Field to Table, and watched YouTube videos of  how different foods were made (such as this one on Fortune Cookies) to augment their print research. It was especially good for those who had difficulties reading.
• Kathy Epps at ISOCS has YouTube playlists for videos that highlight the PYP Attitudes, e.g. this playlist for Respect. There are lists of books suitable for the PYP out there, but it’s great to see YouTube being used as a resource in a similar way.
• Many of us use the Common Craft videos on YouTube to introduce applications or ideas to students or staff. Their simple and effective method of explanation appeals to all.

How have you used YouTube as a learning resource? Would you encourage students to head to YouTube to learn more about things they are interested in?

I look forward to your ideas!