Learning to Podcast in Our after School PD Session

Our after school PD sessions kicked off again today and I have decided to do a few weeks of unplanned sessions where people can pop in and cover what they need to.
This proved interesting today when Carol, our Food Technology / Catering and Hospitality teacher came and we ended up doing podcasting.

She wanted an interactive way that students can be involved in the recipe process.

So the original plan is that Carol will make a podcast of the ingredients, using Garage Band, so the students have to listen to the instructions. With it being in podcast from, they can listen as many times as they need to. She will then embed this on her site, via Sound Cloud, where she will combine it with a Google form where the students have to fill in the method.

Carol then plans to move on to the students doing the whole process them selves.

We had a lot of fun today, recording the voice tracks, putting in jingles and adding illustrations of the recipes.

Help Sessions are all go...

We kicked off the term with a help session this afternoon. I decided to keep the first one a bit free and easy, so people could come in and get help with what they wanted, rather than it be a structured topic.
So we did a bit of Class Dojo, which was fun, putting our classes in and deciding what they would get awards for.  We then covered a bit of using images for the front page of a site as buttons to other site pages. This then lead on to a bit of what I have planned for next week which is making your own site header using Pic Monkey.  I have a How To on one way to do this here.
It is interesting to hear from staff what they want to cover and it made for an interesting session that went over very quickly..
Gummy bears with the chocolate biscuits today certainly helped.

Here is the rest of the plan for this term.

Saying No to Paper, Scissors and Glue....

We had a session this afternoon after school for those teachers who want another option to making posters using paper, scissors and glue.
It doesn't matter what subject you do or the age of the students, we all make posters to present work, give information or explain things at some point.
To make this an online activity, we mainly looked at Glogster today.

This is a free online poster making tool, but it is more than that. You can embed videos that play on the poster and add moving GIFs to them too.
This makes it very adaptable to individual needs and the staff who came to today's session went away very excited about the possibilities of what they can do with it in their subject areas. We discussed doing screen shots of the students work on Google docs, spreadsheets, graphs etc, and uploading these to Glogster as a different way for the students to present final pieces of work. We also talked about making videos specifically to put onto a Glogster poster. For those students who still love drawing by hand, they can still do that, scan their work in and include it onto a Glogster as a mixed media presentation.
Everyone set up their free Glogster account today and had a play with the basics.
We then went over how to embed a Glogster onto a Google site. This is easy to do, as you just have to grab the embed html code. You just have to make sure you put it onto the html part of the edit page on a Google site. This is good to know as all out staff and most of the students all have their own Google sites. I look forward to seeing what the staff who came to the session today come up with themselves and get the students to do.

We're all Really Blended...

We had another after school PD session today for an hour. This week's topic was blended learning.
I set up a simple scanner with one of the Asus netbooks, so staff could have a go at scanning work, book pages and worksheets straight into a netbook. I showed them how Google docs rips out the typed words from a worksheet, and lays it out for you. This works for a scan of something or a photograph of a page.
I made a "How To" on this topic here.
At the moment, Google docs is poor at doing this if there is columns in the page you are converting, as it mixes it all together, but we are hoping for improvements from Google here.
I showed the staff how easy it is to install "Simple Scan" onto the netbooks, so they can pass this onto students. It will be good when students can just take their netbooks to a scanner, connect it on and then easily scan the work that they have produced on paper, ready to upload onto their Google drive.
Next, I showed them how I use Flickr in DVC to upload the student work. I have links to this Flickr site on the DVC site so it is easy for the students to find it so they can then find the photographs of their own work, download them and use them on their own sites or documents.
Link to the DVC Flickr here.
I use Flickr for this rather than Picassa as I use my Picassa for images that I want to use on my DVC Google site and I don't want to fill it up with the student work photos. I take a lot of photos as the students are working, especially when they are producing 3D work.
Making the students responsible for finding and downloading their own work saves trying to remember who's work belongs to who and emailing it to them.
We discussed having some kind of camera available in the class when you know when the students are going to be doing something you will need evidence of. I personally have an iPhone, so I always have a semi decent camera in my pocket.

We all work in classrooms where we do a combination of work directly online and on paper  in books or 3D. It is good to have a variety of methods where you can get the work online so it can be all together, be able to be embedded onto student Google sites and documents, and appearing on the teacher dashboard to be checked and marked. This saves staff looking in lots of places to find work. It is all in one place.

After School PD Sessions are all Go Again...

We had a good time after school today, during our regular after school Thursday "help" sessions.
This week, we covered the basics of using iMovie for creating movies.  We have already covered using YouTube, so now staff are equipping themselves with the ability to create their own content to load up to YouTube and embed on their sites, rather than relying on other peoples' video content.

We started the session by using the Flip video cameras to record a little bit of content around the room and the corridor. Luckily, there was a Media Studies after school session running in the same room, so the students were more than willing to be filmed by staff.

We then went over getting the video footage from the camera up to iMovie, starting a new project, what the areas on the iMovie work area are,  choosing clips, transitions, titles and music and sound effects. By the end of the hour, everyone had put some clips together and used a variety of the things we had covered. They then saved out their movies as mp4s ready for uploading. Not bad for just under an hour.
The students in the room, who were all knowledgable Media Studies students, were amused by staff being taught these basic skills. Cheeky things.

Learning Lots on our YouTube Session

It is the weekly help session again and this time we covered a few You Tube tips

For people who don't have a YouTube channel yet, it was easier to start from Gmail, as everyone can find that, click on more then YouTube is the third choice down.

When you then click on your log in on the top right, a selection drops down where you choose Video Manager. This is where you would view all your uploads of you have any but on a new account it prompts you to make a channel.

At the top of the screen is a nice big, friendly "upload" button, so we all had a go at uploading a small video onto the newly created channel.

Then we moved on over to having a quick look at the YouTube video editor.

It lists all your uploaded videos which you can then edit together with the simple to use tools that it gives you. It also lets you have access to some creative commons videos, which are good for having a practice.

This is a good place to start for people with no editing experience as it is pretty user friendly and doesn't include too many bells and whistles to confuse the beginner. You can include music, titles and add some simple transitions.

What really got people interested this week was when we looked at playlists.

You can add your own videos to playlists or any that you find on YouTube made by others.

You can access your playlists from the video manager, down the side, underneath the uploads option.

It shows all your playlists and how many videos you have in them. 

When you find a good video while browsing, and wish to add it to a playlist, it is very easy to do.

Underneath the name of the video, there is an "add to" selection. When you click on this, it lists all of your playlists or gives you the option to make a new one.

Embedding a playlist.

When we were experimenting with embedding a YouTube playlist, we discovered that the HTML that you get from the playlist will not work on a Google site, either giving you a "this video does not exist" message or only playing one video from the playlist, depending on where, of the two choices,  you got the code from.

This same HMTL code worked perfectly on a blog. A player is embedded which plays one of the videos with a skip button so you can skip to another in the playlist. you can see the skip button on this screen shot of a test blog.

We have no idea why it would work on the blog but not the site and this was quite frustrating, but people went away happy with playlists on the whole, as they are useful tools to collect like videos together and play them all without having to play lots individually.

The Moving Help Sessions.....

So the Wednesday afternoon help session has become the Thursday afternoon help session to cater for people's meeting commitments.
Today we did work about Google sites. I covered some basics to start with, which were the questions that I am always getting asked by staff.

• How to make the navigation on the top and not down the side.
• How to add pages to the horizontal navigation bar.
• How to make pages drop downs from the horizontal navigation bar.

This was good for some of the staff who came, as these are the things that you don't do every day so you forget and need refreshers. It was also no hardship for those who came that didn't really need this.

What got people going during this session was the work we did on "blinging" your site.
This was for people who are sick of the Google theme choices and want to make their own but who don't have any Photoshop skills.
We used online resources that can be used and accessed anywhere and on any machine.

Picmonkey
Colourlovers
Cooltext

We went over taking a screenshot of a chosen background from Colourlovers.com then putting it into PicMonkey and resizing it so that it would fit on their site. We then played with all the bits you can add to an image in PicMonkey, like shapes, lettering creatures and critters etc. This took a while as the choices are pretty wide and you can spend / waste a lot of time on these 2 sites.
I hit a frustration corner when I was trying to show the group how to change the width of the site so that it fits with the size of the graphic they have made. We discussed 900px being a good site size for a netbook, which is why we made the header that size.
Google, in their drive to change things and confuse us, have changed how you alter the width of the site and I guided the group to the wrong settings area for a while as we hunted for the correct setting.
We found it across the top of the "edit site layout" option of "more".

Thanks Google!!.....not

We then had a quick look at using 3 columns instead of just one on the layout option so that it is easier to layout buttons that you can make on Cooltext.com to link the site to other pages on the site or external web pages.

Not bad for an hour and the chocolate biscuits always help...

Bloggidy Blog....

It's the second week of our Wednesday afternoon help sessions, and we covered blogging basics today.
I had a group of staff who had never blogged before, so that made it an easy session with no differentiation needed.
We started right from the start, finding blogger, starting a blog and finding a url that no one else has. We covered writing a blog post, inserting a picture, then moved on to getting the html embed code from YouTube so they could embed a video.
What really caught everyone's interest was the use of labels and a label gadget down the sidebar. As first time bloggers, this interested them the most as they are planning on doing whole class blogs so will use this labeling system with the students names in order to find al the posts by individual students. I showed them how I do this with my Year 9 tutor class. Link here.
The hour session went over quickly with everyone logged onto a computer, making their own scratch blogs and having a real hands on go at everything. They all went away with plans on which classes they were going to use this with so they can have a go with the "proper"stuff.
We had a good selection of chocolate biscuits this week too!!

Wednesday Afternoon Help Sessions

Recently. Russel our DP in charge of the whole blended learning thing ( and its a LOT to be in charge of!! ), sent out a Google form to get staff feedback about their PD needs.
It turns out that the consensus is that after school sessions and department sessions are what people want! So we sent out a google doc, with a list of sessions each week for the rest of this term. Here is the link. Staff can sign up to what they want as to where they judge their needs are most after doing this for over a year now.
Our first session was today and it seemed to go ok. I had 6 people interested in working on Google calendars and they were so keen that they got there before me !
We covered real basics like making an appointment and then moved on to sharing calendars with others, putting in information that can be seen by others and then we had a go at inviting each other to made up events.
What was popular next was making multiple calendars and then embedding them onto a Google site so that students can see the course planning on a calendar.

As I have been using my calendar A LOT and have loads of different ones for all sorts of things, I didn't think it best to show the start up basics on my own, so I made a dummy account today.
It is under the name of my dog, Bobby.
What is worrying me now is that when students are sharing their work with me they will accidentally share it with Bobby instead, as he is in the system as Bobby Ferguson. Never mind, as long as he does the marking!! So far Bobby has a gmail account, a calendar with appointments on ( apparently he does Social Studies ) and a Google site with his calendar embedded into it.
Next week he will be making a blog as that is our next topic.

The general feeling as they left today, was that they need to practice in order to get it firmly in their heads, but that is the same with all of the this Google stuff. If you don't use it regularly and do it, then the next time you try you have forgotten how to. It explains why I have to show the same people the same things over and over again.

This Pd session was powered by timtams supplied by management :D