Is it us? Unrealistic expectations? Too many things to roll out at once? Disorganized folks on the tech end of our department? Faulty equipment? I fear that the answer is one of those annoying “it’s just the nature of technology…” type of things. But sigh…it’s the beginning of the school year and we’re backpedaling, scrambing, covering, and improvising despite our best-laid plans. Breathe…

Over the summer, we continued the process of creating a standard classroom technology setup in our 4th-8th grade classrooms. Almost every classroom now contains a permanent mounted LCD projector, DVD/VHS player, stereo tuner, speakers and lectern. In a growing number of classrooms, we have also installed interactive whiteboards and document projectors. Teachers’ feelings about this new equiment ranged from ambivalent to trepidatious to thrilled. We did a brief training in late-August, showcased how some of our early adopters are using their new tools at a meeting in mid-September and have been doing plenty of one-on-one handholding, troubleshooting and training. A few weeks ago, I decided to wander between our Upper School classrooms to see whether I could capture teachers in the act of using their new tools. I was overjoyed to find technology being used in a range of ways, across curricular and grade-level areas.

Below is a slideshow of the Upper School teachers (Grades 6-8) using their new classroom technology on a random Friday morning in late September. (This slideshow was my first attempt at using RockYou and the jury’s still out for me about whether I like this tool.)

[rockyou 87732222]

Download

To give a listen to the kids’ work (which I must say, sounds fabulous!) go to any of the 3 class sites below:

• Huckleberry Room
• Banyan Room
• Maple Room

The iRiver is my new best friend. I’m impressed with the sound quality, ease of use and storage capacity. Less impressed so far with the Snowball USB mic we just got, but I’ve admittedly only just started playing with it.

Each Spring, the MCDS 1st Graders host the First Grade Library as a culminating project to celebrate their collective growth as readers and writers. Students hand write a series of stories, edit the stories, type them into a PowerPoint template I’ve created for the project, print the stories out, illustrate each page and bind them. Then parents and students fr

om other grade levels peruse the “library” of stories and check stories out to read and write reviews.

This year, we decided to add an audio component to the project. Each student will pick a favorite story and we will record them reading the story. The plan is to burn a CD of stories for each class, and to hopefully create a podcast of the stories that the larger community can enjoy.

I’m experimenting with our new iRiver T30, which I absolutely love in some ways, but is turning out to be a lot less M

ac-friendly than we had been led to believe. (MP3 files won’t import directly into GarageBand — Audacity is needed as a go-between.) In order to upload the kids’ audio, I’m doing a rather convoluted set of steps which I would love feedback on — I actually have no idea if this is the best way to do it. It is definitely NOT simple, and there’s no way that I’d ask a classroom teacher to do this for him/herself. So here are my steps:

1. Record students reading their stories onto the iRiver (I thought about adding an external mic, but the sound quality w as practically identical.)
2. Drag the mp3 files off the iRiver onto my iMac desktop
3. Open the files in Audacity and edit out the stuff I don’t want. Export the files as an mp3 or wav file. I’m doing it this way because GarageBand won’t recognize the mp3s directly off the iRiver.
4. Import the Audacity-created mp3s into GarageBand. Add jingle music ot beginning and end of stories. Use the Share Podcast command and save the mu4 file to my desktop
5. Upload the mu4 file to my archive.org account (I won’t even MENTION how cumbersome that process is!!)
6. Create a blog entry in the class edublogs blog with a link to each individual podcast
7. Burn a feed for the blog using feedburner
8. Publicize

I have only done 3 files so far, and it was really time consuming and a lot of steps. To hear what I’ve done so far, go to http://huckleberry.edublogs.org or to http://feeds.feedburner.com/huckleberry and see if you can get it to work.
Click here to hear my maiden attempt at uploading audio to archive.org before I had the kids do any recording.

So really — world — I’d love any advice about how to simplify this project and how to keep it relatively inexpensive and teacher-friendly.

Thanks in advance and I’ll be sure to post more about this as the project progresses.

How to set up the projector:

• What equipment you’ll need
• How to reserve a projector
• Step-by-step hookup demonstration
• Troubleshooting
• You may check a projector out for multiple days and can get a tech coordinator to come with the projector to help them teach a lesson

What to prepare ahead of time on your laptop:

• Shortcut to the website or Word/PPT document with links
• Writing or visual prompt
• Use a KWL or Venn diagram template in Inspiration, PPT template, etc.

Hints about presenting with an LCD projector:

• How to change the view size in Internet browsers
• Word: Play with zoom and font sizes for easier viewing
• Inspiration: Setting default “look,” using fit-to-page, arrange and rapid fire
• Mac OS X Tiger: Using the zoom feature (Apple-Option-8, then Apple-Option-+)

Using an LCD projector to:

• Present student work (PPT, movies, etc.)
• Introduce a unit
• Introduce/reinforce writing skills (how to write a letter)
• Review tech skills
• Look at pertinent websites (virtual Japanese house)
• Watch DVDs

Other examples:

• Online math explorations
• Library of Congress images
• Volcano videos
• Constitutional Walking Tour of Philadelphia
• Google Earth

Show movies, movie clips and audio (don’t forget the speakers!)

• Listen to read-aloud audiobooks by the author in iTunes
• Play video/audio clips
• Poetry jukebox
• Prelinger film archives
• Listen to iTunes radio
• Listen to Talking History or foreign language podcasts
• Keep in mind “cognitive load” when using text, audio and graphics!

Using the LCD projector with a tablet:

• General
• If you write faster than you type, try inking a class discussion
• Pass tablet around the room to have different students fill things out
• Certain software and websites (KidPix, painting software, virtual manipulatives) lend themselves to using a stylus

• Microsoft Office
• Install the MS Office tablet feature, which lets you add ink annotations to Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Create slideshow of pictures/photos to compare & contrast, then ink on them

• Journal and OneNote
• Go to Print menu and send any document or web page to Journal or OneNote.
• Once a file’s in OneNote you can write on top of diagrams, highlight text, circle sections of a map
• Send a copy of class notes to Outlook, OneNote or Journal
• OneNote allows you to add voice record feature to notes
• In OneNote, Windows-S does screen capture and adds to notes
• Notes can be shared, group edited, saved to server folder and/or Sharepoint