Sasquatch – Augmented Reality
Been looking in to Augmented Reality for a while now:
“Augmented reality is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery”
Thank you Pete O’Brien for introducing me to this cool online application (http://www.livingsasquatch.com/) where Augmented Reality is used to create a hologram of ‘Sasquatch’ the little bigfoot. The videos are free to create, no subsciption required and it’s free to download and email your final movie. Will hopefully introduce this to the children in a few weeks and keep you posted on how it goes. For now take a look at my first video and let me know what you think.
Can you imagine how much the kids are going to love this!
Year 5 Picasso Website
During ‘Art Work’ year 5 decided to study the work of Picasso. The ICT element of the unit was introduced to the children as a ‘Real World’ activity, I was from the London Art Museum and required a team of designers to create for me a website about the legendry Picasso. The purpose of the website was to provide young children with information about his life and work as well as providing a small gallery of his art collection.
With only 5 lessons to complete the task the children worked extremely hard and produced some excellent end products. We used Serif WebPlus a free, child friendly application to develop the site and the winning design (by 10 year old Sophie J) can be seen here.
In: Examples of Student Work
Wordle
After attending the year 4 school trip to Dibba, the students worked on describing their experience. When introducing the ICT element of the unit we worked on keywords, discussing what words we knew we could use and then finding synonyms of these words using www.easydefine.com
Once the students had built up a bank of keywords we entered them in to Wordle (www.wordle.net ). This creatred for us a graphical representation of our words which the students could then edit and format.
Below is just one example of work created by a year 4 student (Jack T), all finished graphics were of excellent stadard and the children really enjoyed using the Wordle website.
In: Examples of Student Work
March of The Penguins
This is an example of a piece of year 6 work (Molly T – 11 years old).
The topic was March of The Penguins, the idea was to incorporate ICT in to the topic by creating a trailer/advert pitch for an up and coming documentary using Photo Story 3.
The children first of all had to create a dramatic introduction using still images, audio and text. Then they had to create short snippets/clips of information that would be covered in the documentary e.g. The Penguin life cycle, hunting for food etc.
This is just one example of many fantastic final products. An excellent collaborative unit, showing good practice of how ICT can be incorporated in to a themed project.
In: Examples of Student Work
Useful Websites for ICT in Education Web 2.0
With the introduction of Web 2.0 technology ICT in education has more potential than ever to provide extended learning for students of all abilities and interests. Web 2.0 technology plays to the strengths of educators by opening the doors to collaberation and participation. I have researched many new technologies and below I have listed those which I feel all teachers (primary or secondary) would find useful and engaging for all children.
www.edmodo.com – A private social platform for teachers and students to share ideas, files, events and assignments. I am loving this site, only had a little play with it myself and just waiting for the right time to introduce it to the students but it is fantastic what I have seen!
www.diigo.com - The Toolbar offered for donload on this site allows you to highlight and add stickies to websites and then keeps a log of these highlights and stickies. Fantastic research tool!
www.wallwasher.com – An on-line noticeboard maker where you can attach video’s, images, files and links. Again another excellent collaberation tool.
www.voicethread.com – A collaberation tool which allows you to share and interact with images, documents and videos. This website is awesome and can be used in so many different ways.
www.livingsasquatch.com – Augmented Reality…”It’s the future!”. A FANTASTIC application with so much potential and something the children will totally engage with., give it a go and let me know. (also try http://scimorph.greatfridays.com/#/home)
Enjoy and let me know what you think about them!
Resizing many images at once
In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to use a simple option to resize many images in one go. If we all do this once we have taken pictures and before we transfer them to our school shared area, we will dramatically reduce the file size of our ‘photographs’ folder, which will give more storage for other resources.
Please Note: This same process can be done to any images you have already transfered to the shared area, or your own area but don’t forget to delete the original large images once the new ones have been created.
In: Software · Tagged with: file size, images, reduce, resizing
Docking our laptops
There seems to have been some confusion and problems encountered when docking our laptops on to the new stations. This video tutorial explains these problems and demonstrates how to solve them.
Please Note: I would advise that all teachers watch this tutorial
In: Hardware · Tagged with: docking, Laptops, network, stations
How to download youtube videos and save them to your computer
In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to use the software available at school to download a youtube video and save it on to your computer so that you can play it to the children without having to be connected to the internet.
Please Note:
- Towards the end of this tutorial I show you the video working on my computer but it appears as a black screen (as if nothing is playing), it is actually working it’s just my screen capture software does not capture video on the screen.
- Don’t forget to click on the arrow on the activity window to see the youtube video downloading
Final Note: You can delete the .FLV file off of your computer once you have converted it.
In: Software · Tagged with: flv, videos, youtube
mwoo says hi!
Finally….. the first blog post from mwoo designs.
I should start by explaining why I’ve set up this blog, I’ll keep it simple.
- I’m a teacher by trade and a web designer by hobby
- I feel that there are a few grey areas within teaching
- The grey areas include:
- Staff development in ICT, particularly in basic to intermediate skill
- Demonstrating simple or complex solutions to staff is both time consuming and a struggle (you can never get hold of them)
- Sharing good practice amonst staff, including examples of students ICT work is often difficult
- Visual aids to solutions are far better than written documentation (so the focus will be on video tutorials)
In light of these issues I will be developing this blog to hopefully educate teachers on simple solutions to common problems and share good practice, including examples of students work.
PLEASE feel free to comment on any of the posts found here in, (constructive comments please) and don’t be shy to make requests on any issues you would like me to cover or examples of good practice you have observed or implemented.