Online Video Editing with Jaycut

30/01/2011 at 9:06 am · Filed under Accounts and Services, Applications     

Online video editing is coming of age. One nice tool that does the job as good or better than the free standalone software you’ve used with your students is Jaycut. Jaycut provides a simple interface, perfect for upper elementary to high school kids, to import pictures, videos, and sounds, and assemble them on a standard video timeline. The final product can be embedded in an ePortfolio, downloaded, or shared via a link. As of this writing it is completely free and only requires a simple signup. The video below provides a nice review of this application.

Video Game – E3 2011 – Web Tools

Getting Started

To use this service you will need to create a free account, as will your students. You can consider having groups of students working on a project use one account to share among them so that everyone has access to the video files from anywhere.

Creating a Video

Once you login select Create a Video to open the editor.  Once the editor has opened you can click Add Media (upper right) to get some video footage or still images in your collection.   You can choose to upload from  your computer, capture video with a webcam, or narrate a soundtrack.

With some media in your collection,  simply drag items onto the timeline at the bottom to create your movie.  Video tracks can be cut or trimmed to your liking.  Only one audio track is available at this time.

Sharing your Video

When you have finished your movie,  you can publish it to the web or download it to your computer or mobile device.  After clicking Publish/Download in the lower right,  you can choose from any of the three options above.  Download it to your computer to have a permanent copy of your video.  Choosing publish to the web brings up a choice of Publish to YouTube, Embed, or Publish to Jaycut’s video community.   Select the embed option to put a movie on your class page or blog.

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IXL Reports

02/12/2010 at 10:41 am · Filed under Accounts and Services, Tech Support for Teachers, Uncategorized     

IXL Math Reports are a great way to get a quick overview of your students’ progress on all the math skills they’ve been assigned or have worked on during the school year.   There are a lot of reports available, but some of them are more useful and versatile than others. Follow the Prezi embedded here to look at the reports described in the remainder of this post.

IXL Reports Overview on Prezi

Default Skills Report

Most teachers are after one thing:  how are my students doing on the skills we are working on right now in class?  For this quick information, the easiest way to fetch it is to click on the bar graph icon next to a particular skill on the IXL skills home page.

Status Updates

The status update reports are the first reports presented to you when you enter the reports home page.  The Class Overview gives a high-level view of student practice of different skills over time, while the Student Overview gives the same information about any particular student.  The Performance on All Skills report shows how a particular student is progressing on all grade 3 skills for the year.

Performance Reports

Drilling down into the different skills and students,  you can find several useful reports under the Performance category.  The most useful of these is the Performance by Student report.  This one shows the relative number of skills at all levels of mastery for each student.  One instant take-away from this report is the obvious grouping of students that do extra work outside of the classroom, those that do the required classroom work, and the those that need to improve.   Perhaps you would like to see a visual breakdown of how a student is doing in the different skill categories, such as addition or division.  The Student Performance by Category report is perfect for this and allows a quick drill-down into the categories specific skills.

Trouble Spots

Its easy to see where students need to improve the most with the Class Trouble Spots report that can be easily filtered by category, limited by a % of skills practices, or drill-down into to view a specific skill.

Progress

On occasion it might be worthwhile to review student improvement over time, and though this report can be difficult to derive useful data from,  the Improvement Rankings report can quickly tell you which students have shown the most growth.  Drilling down by category is a good way to get valuable data about student improvement in math skills.

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Fair Use of Copyrighted Material

25/10/2010 at 12:01 pm · Filed under Digital Citizenship      Tagged ,

One of the best resources I’ve come upon that explains fair use teachers is the Code of Best Practices for Media Literacy in Education from American University.  Also worth reading is Kelly Walsh’s post on the same topic, especially his treatment of creative commons licenses.

According to this code,  if you approach fair use with the idea that you and your students can use even copyrighted material for teaching and learning without permission but with proper attribution,   you are probably right.  In fact, in an educational setting it is highly unlikely that students producing valid learning artifacts will use material in a way that violates copyright laws.

There are two key questions pulled from the code above that you can use to test for fair use that will trump all other concerns.

Is the use transformative?

“Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?”

In other words, if the work is used to promote learning or cultural gain in any way rather than just to reproduce the work for free or for personal gain, it is transformative.  Since the vast majority of what we teachers do is the former,  you’ll probably pass this test every time.

Is the use appropriate?

“Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?”

The reason copyright exists is to protect the economic interests of the copyright holders.  If the use of a work does not supplant or otherwise interfere with the core market of the copyright holder,  then it is appropriate use.  You can’t hide behind fair use if students have set up a mini Napster on your school server, but you could invoke it to justify a student project using copyrighted songs for, say, an environmental awareness project.

The need for Creative Commons

Despite the relative freedom that educators have,  it remains our moral imperative to model and teach the concepts of copyright to students as soon as they begin consuming and using media content.  The most effective way to do this is by setting an expectation that students use Creative Commons search tools to locate material that is licensed for non-commercial use.  If suitable material cannot be found under a CC license,  the student may, with guidance from the teacher, apply the code of fair use to copyrighted material on condition that they understand, to some extent, how their adaptation of the work is worthy of exception.  Look upon this not as a burden, but as an opportunity; we must pursue the goal of educating critical thinkers, not rule-bound drones.

In all cases, any work used must be given proper attribution to the creator or copyright holder.   More than anything else,  this simple act conveys to all stakeholders that the user’s intent is not to claim the work for personal or financial gain at the expense of the creator or copyright holder.school?

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Technology & Learning MS/HS

21/10/2010 at 4:08 am · Filed under Applications, Teaching & Learning, Technology & Learning     

TechandLearning_edited-2

MindMeister

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Collaborating on-the-fly.

14/10/2010 at 6:31 am · Filed under Applications, Teaching & Learning     

Sometimes as a teacher or student you feel the need to have a place simply to collect ideas and artifacts in a collaborative space without the hassle of creating student accounts, logging in,  or learning a new skill.  There are several tools like this out there,  but I’ve highlighted a few below that have been tested and that we can easily support at ASB.

Wallwisher

This Google Doc-like tool allows a group of people to post text, images, audio, and video “stickies” to a wall  and share that wall with others.  Anybody with the link to the wall can post on it simultaneously.  It takes mere minutes to set one up and post it to your class web page, or share with a group of collaborating peers.  Here is an example wall that includes a video of using Wallwisher with posterous.  This tool is great for getting quick reflections from students after a lesson, posting ways in which students demonstrate their understanding about a concept, planning a collaborative lesson with students, or collecting certain kinds of data.

Posterous

Posterous allows anyone to set up a blog for free, post a link and a password for the blog,  and then watch the posts pour into the shared blog.  Users can post either through the web interface, via email, a bookmarklet, twitter, or mobile phone.  If  posting by email,  attached audio or images get embedded in the post and subjects become tags.  You will need to set up an account and confirm it via your email before you can use this service, but invited bloggers will only need a link and a password which you set up. Another nice feature of Posterous is the autopost service.  This allows any contributions to Posterous to be replicated to Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Flicker and others.  It could be a good way to keep your social networks in syc.

Wiggio

Wiggio is probably the easiest group collaboration tool when a bit more sophistication is required.  It has a full set of tools including discussion boards, voice messaging,  polling, calendars, conference calling, online document editing, chat, and many other features.  If there is a more feature-rich service available to anyone,  we’re not aware of it.  It requires an account set-up but once you’ve created a goup, joining and collaborating is easy.

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