My 10 favourite web 2.0, 2007

Being an absolute beginner at web 2.0 until June, 2007, I am going to reflect on the 10 web 2.0 sites that I have enjoyed using most this year. I am following the lead of my friend Chrissy, Teaching Sagitarrian who helped start me on this amazing journey. See her favourite 5 web 2.0 in the classroom for 2007. 

Mine are as follows but not necessarily in order of preference:-

1. http://del.icio.us.com  this is where I started, easy and great social bookmarking
2. www.bubbl.us used widely for brainstorming with my classes
3. blogs at www.wordpress.com with a lot of help and encouragement from Heather Blakey and Jess of technolote
4. www.wikispaces.com used for classroom use and also for summarizing my ejourneys with the students.
5. docs.google.com for online sharing of documents and spreadsheets with classes in other countries.
6. www.skype.com – videoconferencing with powerful learning applications, used with NZ and Korea
7. www.voki.com for fun, user protected podcast type applications – great for short comments and intros
8. www.podomatic.com for hosting our student podcasts
9. www.teachertube.com for hosting our videos
10. www.surveymonkey.com for easily created online surveys

Skype that Call!!

Skype has opened up a whole new world – cyber and international. Skype is VOiP (Voice over internet protocol) which allows (to put very simply) two computers to ring each other like a telephone. Such calls are then free, except for the cost of the download time.

We have two sons who live in London and skype allows us to keep in constant contact with them, either by speaking to each other, text chatting or by videoconferencing. Living in a rural community,  our neighbourhood telephone lines went out of order recently and as there is no mobile phone service in our area, we were able to put credit on our skype account and ring landline telephone numbers. This allowed us to have some communication with the outside world.

Skype is wonderful and has such huge potential in the educational field. It allows us to ring teachers in other countries, to share lesson plans and ideas and to work collaboratively on setting up wikis. However, the best use for our school has been that of videoconferencing with a school in Korea. Last week, we spent five days trialling the use and impact of skype. First, we had students from each country ask questions as they thought of them. The second time, we had already worked out the type of questions to ask eg what are your school hours, typical lunch foods, subjects studied, weather, where we live etc. By the fifth day we really used the technology.

 One of our boys had found a blue tongued lizard. He brought it into our library and put it up against our small web camera. The Korean students could actually see his little blue tongue going in and out. The Korean students then took their camera to the window and we could see their beautiful snow clad school yard right down to a man sweeping the snow away with a wooden broom.

They had asked us about  sports that we play. Having worked out the potential of the camera, a year 9 boy leapt from his seat to go and get a cricket bat, ball and stumps. Our library was converted into a cricket field with demonstrations of bowling and batting displayed in front of the web camera. It was then time to bring in a meat pie because no matter how we verbally described it, they could not grasp what it was. Vegemite soon followed and with that all sorts of questions and impromptu conversations flowed. Students forgot their shyness about their language skills and we started to really learn from each other. Korean students then showed us their wonderful mobile phones and features. Finally we compared uniforms but the bell went and we had to continue on to our other subject areas.

Surely this is powerful learning!!!! Students are activating their own education and wishing to research further and learn more about each other. As a result, short videos have been added to teachertube to show what Korean students have for lunch and a brief visual tour of the school. Our students made a canteen video to show them what we can purchase for lunch.

Grade 6 students interviewed a volunteer from the Penshurst volcano discovery centre. The interview was recorded with powergrammo and then used to insert into their podcast on the volunteers at the centre.

 To use skpye, you need to

• download the software which is free,
• register with a user name and password. There are no telephone numbers, but instead a user name. You can search for other people’s usernames and add them as contacts. To ring, you simply highlight the appropriate name and press the green phone button.
• a web camera for videoconferencing.
• A desktop microphone gives better quality audio and headphones ensure some privacy.

Download powergramo and the conversation can be recorded. We have produced a podcast at (http://murch.podOmatic.com/rss2.xml or search for using skype – Australia and Korea students at www.podomatic.com), on our first skype session with Korea and Gail Casey, the English teacher in Korea captured it on video at their end.  See it at http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d1cef75ffbe159c1f322) Still photos can also be taken whilst in the video conference. They are automatically saved in my pictures.

Skype is only on staff laptops as security could be a real issue. Our library has an interactive whiteboard for class presentations, but a datashow would suffice. There are other providers of VOiP. Conference calls can also be set up but the video will only work between two callers. Sound can be a problem at times and calls can tend to drop out but despite this overall it works wonders. So skype that call!!

Skyping is such fun – online learning at its best

What a great day we had today! Even though we have used skype briefly with classes and a school from NZ, and our grade 5 teacher and our LOTE teacher use it,  our first big trial in the classroom for me came today when we introduced our classes to students in Korea.Each class was as nervous as the other but some students were introduced, took the microphone and asked each other about their schools, homes and countries. We recorded the conversation with powergramo and the quality of the audio was superb. I am about to edit the 40 minute conversation and convert to an mp3 file and put it up on this blog (if I can get the technology to work) in the next few days.Here are the comments from one of our year 7 students who was in the audience:-Today I learnt that Korean students  live in the school dormitories,wake up at 7:00 and school starts at 8:00 and finishes at 5:00. There school is a scientific school. There age is around 14 to 18 years old. They only watch television at lunchtime for an hour, if they are lucky. Korean people are not good swimmers because there are not many swimming pools around.Korea is the size of Victoria and Australia holds 25 million people and Korea holds 60 million. The students want to be university students. One of the Korean students thinks one of our girls is cute.  When we were skyping them it was -6 degrees and snowing, and in Australia it was 32 degrees. In Korea they can drive when they’re 20 and in Australia we can drive at 18.In Korea they live in apartments. There English was pretty good. I liked it because I could learn about different things in different schools and countries. But not only we could learn about Korea but we can learn about our own students. We will have a go at skyping each other each day this week, but with different classes. Students no longer need to learn about other countries from textbooks but directly from students in their own countries. 

Podcasts are now online

Well, most of our podcasts are finally online. The podcasts largest in file size have been left until last so these will go up some time next week. After being so concerned about whether I could technically put them online without some expert help, I have learned that it is not so difficult to do, after all.

Students saved their audio podcasts in Acid or Audacity (and have kept their original work in case we wish to work with them further.)  and they were then exported as mp3 files. Audacity required a lame codec to be added and this can be found on their web site. Next the files were imported into Vegas Movie Studio ( a digital video editing program which allows really professional touches and finishes.)  All students placed text, titles, fading and digital images. Images had to be resized first down to almost thumbnail size, converted the images from bmp to jpg extensions and then imported them.

Once the images matched the audio and students were satisfied with their product and ensured they were informative and reasonable entertaining, they were made into mpg movie format. This allowed their movies to be reduced in size but could still be played through windows media player with reasonable quality.  Files should always be saved onto the hard drive first. Files were saved again as email wmv files. This reduced them completely in size and the third save involved converting them with jodix (www.jodix.com) into mp4 format. Most files vary from 4mb to 12 mb.

When uploading to www.podomatic.com, we started with the mp4 converted files, but we had forgotten to convert some of the email wmv files and to my surprise, podomatic converted them anyway.  So, after what seems months of dedicated work, a huge steep learning curve, lots of frustration but still mostly fun, all groups of students have completed a podcast of which they are proud. They can now be viewed at www.murch.podOmatic.com or follow the links to the right of this blog. Unfortunately, they still take some time to buffer but we are working on that problem.