RSS, Changing the Internet II

RSS for Education 

RSS is a great tool for teacher to use in order to stay current with the research and best practices. Technology in education is growing at an exponential rate and teachers need to stay current in order to best educate their students (Hendron, 2008).  Teachers can further their knowledge in a time effective manner by using RSS feeds to follow what the Gurus of the industry have to say.  For example, some of the people I am following are: Anne Davies (Assessment Guru), Daniel Mass (Technology Educator), Daniel Espejo (literacy Educator), Allan Gould (Apple Canada) and Richard Williamson (professor at U of T). By following their feeds instead of just randomly going to their sites and checking if they added anything new I am able to utilize my time and apply it accordingly.  A teacher’s time is extremely important because there is always something we need to do. RSS feeds allow teachers to use their time effectively by bringing the information to us as it is create.  

People I Follow

RSS feeds can also be setup for students.  I have not done this yet but this is something that I am going to try with my students (Hendron, 2008).  Right now I do have a couple of blogs setup for my classroom hosted on the Edmonton Catholic School District (ECSD) portal.  I checked with technical support and the ECSD portal does have the ability to create RSS syndication. I envision my students using their already created Google accounts and subscribing to our blogs RSS feeds and having the information come to them as it is created (Richardson, 2004).  I think this will be a lot easier for my students otherwise they will have to keep checking the site to see if there has been any updates or if there are any new important announcements.  Technology can be a burden on schools and educators if it is not used in an effective/efficient manner.  RSS feeds are one way educators can have can have technology work for them instead of the other way around (Richardson, 2004).  Richardson and Duffy share similar findings stating that educators are willing participants when it comes to furthering their knowledge if the right conditions are met. I feel that RSS feeds help provide these necessary conditions and more importantly allow educators to learn at their own pace. 

Personal use of RSS Feeds 

For personal use RSS feeds are great for keeping me organized and even useful around the house.  Instead of going to all the sites I have saved in my favorites and checking on what’s new, now I check my RSS aggregator and the information comes to me. If any of the sites I have saved post something new, I am immediately informed about it and can go check whether it is relevant to what I need or not.  I am following a lot of great feeds such as: Car and Driver, Gordon Ramsey, Wired Magazine, Holmes on Homes, 3 Minutes Fix it, Quick and Healthy Meal Planner and yes even Maxim Magazine.  To put it simply, my technological life has gotten a lot less cluttered since I started using RSS. 

Learning to Cook

References 

Duffy, P. (2006). The use of blogs, wikis and RSS in education: A conversation of possibilities. University of Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. In proceeding Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, pages pp.31-38, Brisbane.

Hendron, J. G. (2008). RSS for educators : blogs, newsfeeds, podcasts, and wikis in the classroom / John G. Hendron. Washington, DC: International Society for Technology in Education, c2008.

Richardson, W. (2004). Blogging AND RSS--The "What's It?" and "How To" of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators. Multimedia & Internet@Schools, 11(1), 10-13.

RSS, Changing the Internet I

Why use RSS

As many of us have learnt, the internet is a great place to go for information and to learn about anything that may interest us. For example: the way I watch TV has changed, now when I am in front of the TV I have my iPad out and I look up the different character I’m watching, what characters are talking about and even products being advertised either within a show or commercials. 

Over the years I have been teaching, I learnt about a great deal of website that serve as superior resources for my lessons, my personal/professional development, and for suggestions of a variety of topics such as cars, cooking and random do it yourself project for around the house stuff.  For those of you who know me, I am not a “do it yourself kind of guy” however with these resources I have taken on many small project and managed not to hurt myself or my wife, yet! 

Only Social and Resource links

So needless to say I have tons of websites in my favorites which are organized according to topic/folders.  At first this was a great way of doing things. When I first starting to use folders to organize my favorite websites it was a gift sent to me from the heavens.  However, as I started collecting more and more favorites, that gift was taken away.  It became too hard to follow all these sites in my favorites, I couldn’t tell when they were being updated, and I couldn’t even tell which one was which any more. I needed a tool that could make my life easier, I needed a tool would check to see when the sites I was following we updated and then tell me about it, in essence I needed a site that would look out for me wave a flag and tell me, hey go check this site that adding something new and even tell me a short caption on what was added.  

Animoto to the Stage, Take II

My First Animoto

To start my first Animoto, I clicked on the “Create” button at the top right hand corner of the page. Needless to say I LOVE the layout of this site. Everything that is important is in green and overall, the site walks you through the steps. For example, the first thing I needed to do was to choose a theme for my presentation.  Because I am a little boring – or because I just wanted to see my first video (you chose) – I clicked on “The Original Animoto.” 

www.animoto.com

The people at Animoto could not have made choosing a theme any easier.  Just click on a theme and BAM! there you have it, you have just chosen how your pictures transition. Now that I am typing this, I can see that I had a lot of options to chose from and maybe I was a little hasty when I clicked on “The Animoto Original.”

How to Create an Animoto video

www.animoto.com

Animoto to the Stage, Take I

Why the interest in Animoto?

Last year a new member our staff used Animoto during one of the school wide celebrations.  Needless to say, I was more that impressed.  The animation, transitions, sound effects, and overall quality was more than impressive. I noticed at the end of the video presentation the word “Animoto” appeared at the start of the credits.  This is how I knew about the program. However, due to the rather busy schedule of a teacher, I was never able to actually play with the program. This year is a different story! By taking a web 2.0 class, I was given the opportunity to explore programs that I have always wanted to play with.  

Highlighting the Research?

Berger & Trexler identified Animoto as a great tool for project based activities for students K-12 (p. 139). Users can upload digital photos, add back ground music and even add text if they choose (p. 139). Teachers can create educational accounts where students can have a safe environment to create their videos that can be shared vie email, blog post, website, YouTube or by downloading it directly onto a computer (p. 140) 

Setting up the account

Setting up my Animoto account was a straight forward process.  After going to the Animoto.com website I simply clicked on the “Sign Up” button that was located in a big green box right in the middle of the page, I couldn’t have missed it if I was trying.  Filling in the “Create an account” required fields took only a couple of minutes and then my account was ready for me to get creative.

 

Screencasting III, For All

Professional Development and Screencasting      

One of my many roles is to assist teachers with their new Ipads. Just like students in a classroom, teachers in a school have different skill sets. What I am trying to say is: while one teacher might need help setting up iTunes, others might need help downloading apps and others might be ready to learn how to program a group of iPads with a set grade level theme so that students can use them. I learnt that I am going to need to differentiate my teaching to meet the needs to my staff. Utilizing Winterbottom’s research on lecturing and screencasting, I started to create lessons focusing on Ipads and how to use them. I used my classroom’s document camera to record what I was doing on the IPad and then recorded the lessons using Screencast-O-Matic. I created many lessons such as:

• How to setup email on an iPad

• How to install apps

• How to update the iPad

• How to update apps

• How to setup PowerTeacher

• How to invite users to events on your calendar

 

Screencasting has made my life so much easier. I post a short three minute video on our school servers for each teacher to watch them at their own pace. It is also important to note that teachers have also started to ask for lessons to be made on other topics. I have started to create lessons on how to create unit plans in Smart Notebook, how to use Storyjumper and how to create Bubbl.us mind maps. I have changed the way I teach and the way I provide professional development because of using screencasting. Screencasting will continue to grow in the ways it can be used in the teaching profession.

Personal Screencasting

I have not used screencasting for personal purposes very much. I have tried to capture images for my university project but that was for school work. I also used Jing to make step-by-step lessons for my staff on how to use a variety of tech tool, but that is my professional life. I used Jing to capture a video of a podcast of my students on TeacherTube because for some reason it wouldn’t download – but again that is work. Maybe the reason I haven’t been able to use this tool yet for personal reasons is because I am so busy with teaching and university, or maybe because all my personal videos and images are already saved in a digital format on my computer that I don’t really need to capture them again. Either way, I love this tool. I have used screencasting so much in the past three months for school and university and have never thought twice about it. No more PrintScreen and then cropping for this guy. Jing and Screencast-O-Matic all the way.

References

Archee, R. (2008). Beyond E-Learning Management Systems: screen casting for presentation and practice. University of western Sydney, School of communication Arts. 2008

Berger, P., & Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing Web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world / Pam Berger and Sally Trexler ; foreword by Joyce Valenza. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Libraries Unlimited, c2010.

Gormely, K. (2011) Do you Jing? How Screen casting can enrich classroom teaching and learning. The Sage College, Troy, New York. The Language and Literacy Spectrum Vol. 21, 2011.

Winterbottom, S. (2007). Virtual lecturing: Delivering lectures using screencasting and podcasting technology. School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Stirling Planet No. 18 June 2007

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms / Will Richardson. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Corwin Press, c2010.

Screencasting II, Classroom Casting

Classroom Casting

When I was reading Will Richardson’s book and research conducted by Ray Archee, I started to brainstorm different ways that my students and I can use screencasting. In this next section, I will explain how we continue to use screencasting and how screencasting has helped students and teachers further their knowledge. Archee’s research “Beyond E-Learning Management Systems: screen casting for presentation and practice” was very interesting to me as it discussed many of the issues that I had already encountered when I was faced with the dilemma of using Jing or Screencast-O-Matic. Archee explains how web based tools can have a positive impact on student learning and how screencasts can help aid those students who might require repeated explanations. While Archee’s research was conducted with university students many of his results were observed in my grade five classroom. My students were more relaxed knowing that if they missing something in a lesson they will be able to see it again on the video. If a student missed class they did not fall behind and if parents wanted to know what was going on in class they were able to access the files.

At first I was creating these screen cast for my students and posting them on our classroom site; however, this quickly changed. I started to think, “Why am I doing the videos? Why can’t my students create them?” I took on eight volunteers (two for math, two for language arts, two for science and two for social) and gave them permissions to post videos on our site. After only fifteen minutes in which I showed them how to use Screencast-O-Matic they were creating their own video tutorials. The work they produced was astounding. I was so surprised at the caliber of their work that I took the time to call home to praise their work. It is important to note that the original eight students who created these video are now teaching other students how to create their own videos. It is my dream that we create a library to tutorials on a variety of topics so that the Alberta Initiative for Anywhere, Anytime Learning can take place. Students have become more flexible when it comes to taking charge over their own learning, they are taking better notes because they can see a lesson more than once and as a result their achievement levels have also increased based on my observations.

Using screencasting in the classroom quickly evolved beyond making tutorials and lessons. We stated to screencast our digital stories and I even assessed student work using screencasting (Gormely). Using the Smart Notebook software, students placed images and text on different slides and narrated their stories. Using screencasting my students then posted their videos on a share drive where we took the time to watch each other’s personal narratives. This was a great experience! I also used screencasting to provide feedback to my students. I captured myself watching each of their videos, adding both audio and text comments and suggestions. I loved using this tool and will continue to use it in the future.

 References

Archee, R. (2008). Beyond E-Learning Management Systems: screen casting for presentation and practice. University of western Sydney, School of communication Arts. 2008 

Gormely, K. (2011) Do you Jing? How Screen casting can enrich classroom teaching and learning. The Sage College, Troy, New York. The Language and Literacy Spectrum Vol. 21, 2011.

Screencasting I, Need I Say More

How little I actually knew!

I always wanted to try using this thing that I heard about called “screen casting.” I had an idea what it was but I couldn’t possibly fathom all of the possible implications on education and my life as a whole. I thought that screen casting is simply a way for capturing what happens on a computer screen. Wow how little I actually knew! I had no idea there were so many different types of screen casting software out there. I was also surprised at the many different ways to capture and the different uses for which captures could be put – in particular in my classroom and personal life.

Different types of Screencasting

I started gathering information on this topic I by typing “screen casting” in to Google. To my astonishment, I got 1.2 million hits on the topic. I quickly realized this was not going to be as straightforward as I originally thought. One hit quickly stood out from the rest, 12 Screencasting Tools for Creating Video Tutorials. The reason I liked this was because Sean P. Aune had done the work for me. He found 12 great sites that provide screen capturing abilities to the public and was informing others about them – just like what I am doing with my blog. After reading and trying out many of these great sites I settled on two that caught my attention: JingScreencast-O-matic. Jing immediately stood out because I had read about it in both Will Richardson’s book “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for Classrooms and Pam Berger & Sally Trexler’s book “Choosing Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Teaching in a Digital World.” Now that my memory was jolted by the reappearance of Jing, I went back into the books and reread the sections that pertained to Jing. I started to think of how I could utilize these tools in my teaching practice and personal life. and

Setting up the Stage for Jing

www.techsmith.com/jing.html

Now that I had chosen the two tools I want to learn more about (Jing & Screencast-O-matic) it was time to set them up. I began with Jing. I used Google to find Jing and was redirected to http://www.techsmith.com/jing.htmlScreencast to provide users 2GB of monthly bandwidth. Screencast also had the ability to make files private to only those people who were invited and had the web address. Even thought this site did provide a safe environment for my students, I decided to use it as a host location for my personal screen captures and saved files for my students on my school district’s online host site. which is the host site and where I was able to download the program. On the first page my eyes were drawn to the top right hand corner of the page where I found the magic button with the word “Free” (Gormely). The next steps were rather straight forward. I clicked on “Free Version,” clicked on run/install and there you have it Jing was successfully installed on to my computer. It was at this step that I realized something very important, but I will tell you about it later on (don’t forget). I needed to create an account using my email account and a password of my choosing. After this information was entered a golden halo appeared on my screen as well as the option of taking the tour of the program. After taking the short tour of the program, I learnt that using Jing I can capture both video and still images displayed on my screen. Armed with this golden halo, I was ready to use the crosshair feature and start taking pictures of my screen and capture short five minute video clips (Gormely). The next thing that I thought about was, “if I am going to use this tool in my class, I am going to need a place online to save my screencasts?” This question was short lived because I remembered what Berger and Trexler said on page 146, Jing had partnered up with

 Setting up the Stage of Screencast-O-Matic

www.screencast-o-matic.com

I quickly discovered that another great screen capture tool was Screencast-O-Matic. While this site was not as versatile as Jing, it was so easy to use and didn’t require downloading (hint hint). All I needed to do was click on the Start Recording button located at the top right of the screen and BAM! ready to go. A dotted box appeared on my screen, using the corners I changed its shape to match what I wanted to record and was ready to record.

I was able to record videos up to fifteen minutes in length and save them right to my computer. This web tool was easy to use and walked you through all the steps, all four of them (start recording, change shape, stop recording, save).

To Jing or Not to Jing?

Overall Jing is a much more powerful tool than Screencast-O-Matic offering more features such as capturing both still images and videos, and providing the users the options of uploading files directly to a blog or other web spaces. However, if you recall my “don’t forget” comment there was one major flaw with Jing; Jing required installation in order to run. As a teacher I do not have the ability to install programs on my work machine and neither to my students. So Jing is not an option that I can use at school; however, I think it is important to note that all the images captured in this post were taken using Jing since I am working on my home computer. Screencast-O-Matic was the more versatile tool to use for me. It didn’t require any installation at all and was entirely web based. The only downloading involved was the downloading of the actual video once it was complete. If you are using these tools on a personal machine Jing is the superior program, but if you are like me and you can install anything on your work computer then Screencast-O-Matic is a great alternate option.

 

 References 

Gormely, K. (2011) Do you Jing? How Screen casting can enrich classroom teaching and learning. The Sage College, Troy, New York. The Language and Literacy Spectrum Vol. 21, 2011. 

 

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms / Will Richardson. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Corwin Press, c2010.