Awesome iPad App: Sock Puppets

Digital storytelling is one of my favorite activities for students to do on the iPad. Letting them do this really brings out their creativity. If done correctly, students can still go through the writing process, learning all those needed skills, and still create a fun product in the end.

Sock Puppets is one of those apps that lets you create digital stories. With it you can create your own puppet shows in seconds. From the Sock Puppets description:

Just add puppets, props, scenery, and backgrounds to start creating. Hit the record button and the puppets will automatically lip-sync to your voice.

Friends can work together and create hilarious conversations with multiple puppets. While recording, simply tap a puppet and that puppet will lip-sync to your voice—all you have to do is tap a different puppet to make them talk back and forth. Switch backgrounds to take your puppets to different places, move the puppets all over the screen and use props and scenery to animate them while recording.

Sock Puppets is only available for iPads. The free version has a limited number of puppets and backgrounds. Projects are also limited to 30 seconds. A “complete” version costs $3.99 and has all the content included and allows for 90 second recordings.

How It Works

Before using the app have students write out their script. This will help the, organize their thoughts and prevent a lot of false starts and stops.

After opening the app tap the New button. Select puppets to appear on the screen. You can select up to four puppets. Tap Next.

 
Select a background. You can select up to 5 backgrounds to use as multiple scenes. Tap Next.

Select up to 4 props to use in your scenes. These will all appear on all backgrounds.  Tap Next.

Arrange the puppets and props and change their size to setup your scene.

Tap the Record button, move your puppets and props, and record your narration. Every time you tap a puppet it will start lip-syncing. You'll see an arrow above it to indicate that puppet is the one talking.

When your show is done, tap the Save button, give it a name, and export it to YouTube or save it to the camera roll.

Integration Ideas

• Explain a science concept
• Retell a story
• Tell about an event from history
• Share information about a famous person
• Model appropriate social behavior
• Tell jokes (Knock-knock jokes work well!)
• Review vocabulary
• Have a mini debate
• ELL conversational skills
• Foreign language practice

Download the Tech Integration Challenge for Sock Puppets and see if you are up to the challenge!

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Blog overload: students as blog authors

image courtesy pixabay.com

In the last few posts here and here I discussed ways of managing student blogs by gathering the blog links into one location. This makes it very easy for the teacher to go through the blogs to comment on and monitor student writing. While working with a high school teacher to incorporate blogging I discovered a third way that can be really useful.

Again, this is for the Blogger platform, which doesn't offer any classroom management for student blogging. Essentially each student has their own blog, which is awesome for customization and staking out their own blogging space on the internet, but difficult in terms of viewing and managing. With the method described in this post, students become authors of the classroom blog. You can then moderate the posts and quickly view all of a student's posts.

After you set up the class blog, go to the Settings tab. In the Basic settings is an option for Permissions. Under Blog Authors click the Add Authors link. Enter the Gmail address for each of your students.

When the students log in to blogger.com with their credentials, they'll see your class blog listed and will be able to create and publish posts.

Clicking their name as a blog author, however, only takes you to their profile. If you want to see all the posts a particular student authored, you'll need to use labels.

Go back in to your blog settings and click the Layout tab. In the sidebar click the Add a Gadget link. Find the Labels gadget and click the + button. Customize it how you want and click the Save button.

When students write their posts, have them add their name as a Label.

Now their names will show up on the sidebar of your blog in a Labels section. Clicking the name will take you to a list of all the blogs with that same label. Essentially this is digital portfolio of their work!

Labels vs Contributors (Authors)

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Youcanbook.me love

image courtesy youcanbook.me

As a Digital Learning Coach in the Clark County School District I have 8 schools that I work with. I rotate through those schools, which means the day of the week I am on campus varies each time. As you can imagine, with that number of teachers and students scheduling can become a nightmare. It's hard to remember which teacher is in which room at which school. Fortunately this year I was introduced to YouCanBook.Me, which has become my new organization love.

You can see how I have my youcanbook.me calendar set up by clicking the Schedule Me tab at the top of this blog.

Here is a short video to give you an idea of how it works.

Setup is super easy. Simply go to the youcanbook.me website and create a free account using your Google calendar or iCloud login. You'll then be guided through the dashboard to link your calendars, schedule your appointment times, and setup the booking form.

This is what the dashboard looks like for me.

I have two iCloud calendars. One shows which school I'm at on a given day. I share this calendar with my wife and boss so they can track me down. The second calendar has the actual appointments and meetings with teachers. With the free version of youcanbook.me you can only link one calendar. I embedded my school calendar on my blog and linked the appointment calendar with youcanbook.me.

In addition to designating appointment slots, you can also define what information you need to gather for each appointment. This is done on the booking form tab. In my case I need to know which school the teacher is at, which room they are in, and what help they need. When the teacher selects their desired appointment time the booking form appears, they fill in the information, and the event is added to my calendar. 

The booking form.

I can even specify how the event appears on my calendar. Not only does the appointment appear immediately on my calendar, but I get an email letting me know I have a new appointment.

I only had one small glitch that I contacted their support team about. It was a known bug, which they fixed, and even gave me a month of premium free to try out.

The results of using this booking system has been astounding so far. I can't always make it around to every classroom or meet all the teachers. When I announce to teachers that I will be on campus on a given day, I also provide a link to my youcanbook.me calendar so they can schedule a time. The amount appointments I have this year has doubled from what it was last year.

Thanks to the team and service at youcanbook.me, I feel so much more productive this school year. Thanks guys and gals!

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Blog overload: Use Feedly to manage student blogs

image courtesy feedly.com

Teachers have limited time to read and assess student work. When you add in student blogging with all the accompanying posts and comments, the amount of work can increase as well. What teachers need is one place to view student blogs, instead of hunting down and bookmarking each URL. Blogging platforms such as Kidblog and Edublogs include classroom management tools to do just that.

Blogger, however, lacks those tools. In a previous post I described how you can add links to a blogroll to make that easier. However, if you are a secondary teacher with multiple periods a blogroll also becomes unwieldy as that list becomes longer.

Another alternative is to use an RSS reader such as Feedly. Feedly is a free service that gathers all the blogs you follow into one location. You can group student blogs by class and quickly see how many unread posts a blog has. There is also a mobile version for your smartphone or tablet. I use Feedly all the time for the many educational blogs that I follow. Here is a screen shot so you can see what that looks like.

The first thing you'll want to do is gather the URLs for your student blogs. Probably the easiest way to do that is simply use a Google form to gather those URLs into one spreadsheet that you can then use to copy/paste them into your Feedly.

Next go to the Feedly website and create your free account. You can use your existing Google login to do that.

Silvia Tolisano, blogger advocate extraordinaire, has directions for adding your student blog URLs in her post The Blogging Kraken: How to Keep Up with All Your Students Blogs. Follow her directions, making sure you name each link with the student's names. Group them by period and you'll be super organized when it comes time to read your students' blogs.

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Blog overload: Keeping up with student blogs

Now that many schools are using Google Apps for Education, teachers are discovering Blogger as a viable platform for student blogging. It is easy to set up, all students with a GAFE account have access to it, and its highly customizable. The one major downside to it is that there is no classroom management component. In other words, teachers don't have one central place to view or moderate blog posts.

In a classroom of 30 students that's 30 separate blogs to keep track of. It makes it hard to keep up with reading posts, giving timely feedback, monitoring copyright, etc. Staying organized and avoiding blog overload may prove difficult.

Fortunately there are two strategies that can be easily implemented to make this easy. This post deals with using Blogger to keep track of student blogs. The next post will show how to use Feedly to easily manage blogs. There are pros and cons to each method so choose the one that works best for your work flow.

With Blogger, and any blogging platform for that matter, you can add a blogroll to the sidebar of your blog. A blogroll is simply a list of other blogs that a blog author follows. You can see an example right here on my blog on the left. It's the section called My Blog List.

You can add all of your students' blogs to your blogroll, combining them in to one place for easy access. Depending on how it's configured, the blogroll can also show a summary or title of the latest blog post.

Log in to your blog at blogger.com. On the left side choose the Layout tab. In the sidebar section click the Add a Gadget link. From the list that appears click the + button next to Blog List.

The Title field would be a name for that section. Select the information you want to see from the student blogs. Click the Add a blog to your list and enter the URL for each student blog and save the gadget.

Students can follow the same steps to add each of their classmate's blogs and have an easy way to comment on each other's blogs.

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Why educators should trust Wikipedia

I’m a huge advocate of using Wikipedia. I know a lot of educators that cringe at the thought of students using Wikipedia as a source of information. For whatever reason there’s little trust in the accuracy of the information. I’ve addressed some of those concerns on my blog at In Defense of Wikipedia.

Recently, Jeff Utecht, an educator/consultant/author that I follow on Twitter, posted on his blog about Wikipedia.

[As educators] if we don’t understand how to use something in education our first reaction is to not use it and to tell students not to use it. To be fair nobody has ever taught us how to use this resource...We don’t understand how Twitter works so block it. We don’t understand how to create learning communities on Google+ or Facebook so block it. Instagram? It’s just pictures!... I love asking groups of teachers how many of them have read and trusted what they read on a Wikipedia article. Almost every hand goes up. So….what you’re telling me is we use it in our daily lives but when it comes to using it with students we should tell them………don’t trust it? There’s a disconnect here that we need to face…..we need to stop teaching that Wikipedia is a bad resource and start accepting it and understanding it.

He then outlines 3 features of Wikipedia that can help teachers feel more comfortable trusting Wikipedia as a source of information. You can read his blog post at Understanding Wikipedia in 3 Clicks.

Thanks, Jeff, for providing even more reasons to trust students to use Wikipedia!

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Reflections on the first week of a Digital Learning Coach

When I talk to teachers and admins about the benefits of blogging, I always mention its usefulness as a reflection tool. This concept is often mentioned in the blogosphere. I love reading other blogs for that very reason. It gives me a chance to see the raw reactions other educators have to experiences, activities, and projects they go through in their own classrooms. I like to read about what worked and didn't work.

As I look back on my own blog I realize that I'm ignoring this very element. Therefore my first post of the new school will be a reflection!

This is my second year as a Digital Learning Coach and this first week has been a mini roller coaster ride for me. I started the year out with high hopes, based on my experience from last year, but then the news that I would have 8 new schools brought me down, followed by the thrill of meeting new schools and teachers.

I went in to this year with the expectation that I would keep the same 8 schools that I had last year. I had spent time developing relationships with teachers and even had several teachers emailing me over the summer with ideas they wanted help with. Prior to ending the the last school year I met with several principals and we outlined several school wide technology initiatives for this school year. I was stoked to get back to work after the summer break!

Then a few days prior to the school year starting I found out that 7 of my 8 schools would be new to me this year. I would have to again start the process of meeting new teachers, explaining my role as a Digital Coach and what I can do for the school as a whole and teachers individually. With 8 schools in my assignment it takes time to build those relationships, sometimes months into the school year.

I sent out emails to principals introducing myself and asking for a few minutes at the beginning of the year staff meetings so I could introduce myself to the staff as a whole. A few principals replied back immediately, others I never heard from. I have found in my limited experience, that when I can introduce myself and the DLC role to the staff as a whole, they can put a face to the name and are more likely to seek out and accept my services. Unfortunately I missed out on this opportunity at several of the schools. 

Several of the schools that I visited this week were schools that I didn't hear back from the principals. My first visit on campus would be to meet them and then spend all day with a staff that I did not yet know. I'm happy to say that all of my experiences this week were great!

I love the chance to meet the principals and hear about their vision for their school. I am impressed with the pride they have for their staff and their students. They are excited to have me on campus and to work with their teachers.

Probably the best thing about being a Digital Learning Coach is the chance I get to meet so many awesome teachers and see the phenomenal job schools are doing. At one of the schools I was talking with a learning strategist who was showing me some data from beginning of the year tests students had already done. The students were showing a significant improvement in the start of the year from the start of last year. She immediately went to the principal to share the data, who then got on the intercom to congratulate the students and tell them how proud he was.

This week I will visit a few more schools for the first time. At two of them I already had the chance to introduce myself to the staff, so I'm hoping to already have the foundation laid and I'll be welcome in to the classrooms.

All in all I'm excited for the schools I have this year. There is a lot of technology out there and schools are doing some phenomenal things with their students. I hope that teachers will take advantage of me and let me work with them!

Share your first week of school experiences with me in the comments below!

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