Simple Student Portfolio Idea
Interested? Looking for one or two teachers to trial.
Are you interested in having students organize their work for the student led conferences? The idea is to use a simple Google Doc template to organize and encapsulate student work.
Slender
When clearing out the Student Resources network folder, I came across a copy of Slender. Not knowing what it was, I opened it up and began to explore. I immediately had flashbacks to The Blairwitch Project, the horror movie from the late 1990’s.
Slender is a free download.
A little creepy but engaging. Jay, a Grade 8 student, says, “Trying playing at night, alone, with the lights out. Watch out.”
Google Apps At ISManila
The use of Google Apps at ISManila has grown organically over the past year. By viewing the charts below, you can get a good idea of its’ growth.
The charts show the growth of collaboration with ISManila and the increase of online storage.
*This is an embedded album from Picasa- part of the Google Apps suite.
Scan Master 2013
As a holiday gift to myself, I purchased a portable scanner-the Scansnap S1100. This simple looking device is smaller than a traditional skinny three hole punch. While in Canada on the holidays, I dug up all my old newspaper clippings, sports stat sheets, high school memorabilia, and old travel photos. With an early cup of coffee, I often found myself watching the World Junior Hockey Championships on TV while at the same time scanning piles of old time memories.
Scansnap allows you to scan as PDF or JPG. Also you can scan directly to Google Docs, Evernote, a mobile device or a desktop folder.It has OCR recognition if you need your PDFs to be searchable.
Back at school, I have found a few minutes to some of my favorite teacher resources that I have a fondness for- old maps, homebase activities, and short stories. I was able to condense an entire binder of printed short stories in a digital format.
Stop by my room to see it in action!
iMovie Issues
This week ISM Grade 6 students are busty preparing United Nations solution proposals regarding coffee, plastic, electronics, or chocolate. Students are using Keynote, Photobooth, iMovie or Garageband to help develop a solid presentation. A few students using using iMovie have encountered some problems. It seems that after working merrily along, the audio will no longer record in project. After much troubleshooting, this issue has an easy solution.
Problem: when the first movie created in iMovie by a new user. If the user accepts the default “My First Project,” occasionally iMovie becomes buggy.
Solution: have the new user create a New Project by selecting File>New Project rather than using the default project.
UN Final Touches
Grade 6 students,
You are in the final stages of your United Nations proposal.
Whether you are using,
*Photobooth
*iMovie
*Keynote
*Garageband
or a combination of many applications
1. Please save your final presentation as:
Example: firstname firstnamepartner topic color homebaseteacher(s)
For real, it might look something like this: annie paolo coffee gold feren powell
2. Place the final video/audio/presentation in Google Drive shared relationship topic portfolio folder(same place as your storyboard).
3. Change the sharing permissions on the video. (This makes it easier for the world to view your videos.)
Click the Share then “Who can Access” Button. Change to People at ISM.
Cool Holiday Website Recommendations
iLearn students have some cool websites you can check out. You can listen to their reviews here or subscribe to the iLearn podcast in the iTunes store.
Google Drive Apps and Extensions
Google Drive Extensions/Plugins Worth Considering
DriveTunes: allows you to play audio within Drive
Gmail Attachments to Drive: adds a Save to Drive link to the View and Download options with Gmail attachments
Spanning Stats for Google Drive: breaks down what type of files you have stored in Google Drive. Fun to see a visual representation.
United Nations Awaits Proposals
Grade Six is beginning the most exciting project of the year! Students will create a convincing presentation to deliver to the United Nations. The presentations will have a tech component: a movie with iMovie, an audio recording using Garageband, an iSight recording using Photbooth, a Keynote presentation or a combination of them.
Here are the tech resources that will be updated as we progress.