In a recent post I asked for help in planning a three-part workshop for my staff on ways to use technology to support writing development. Soon I will write a post to share all of the great responses I received. In the meantime, let me share one of them, ZimmerTwins.com.
I first learned of it from Maggie Hos-McGrane who was using it with some of her students as a way to share their learning at the end of a unit. I played around with it and wasn’t sure how that would work since the characters and settings are so limited. It is very easy to make a movie, but I thought it would be very challenging to create an educational cartoon. However, I also knew that having only 3 characters and a limited number of settings to work with could also help keep the children focused. I decided to jump in and try it with students.
My assistant set up the free accounts for us. It is a tedious business to create a class set. First you complete an online for for each student. Then you go to your email and open each student’s message that contains their password. Since this was a password that the children wouldn’t remember, she next logged in as each child and changed the password to something that will be easier for them to remember. If I were a homeroom teacher, I probably would have given each child their temporary password and then as a class gone in and had everyone change the password to match their Windows login. As a specialist who only sees these children once per week for 40 minutes, my time is too limited to take the time to have the children do that. I now have one class set of accounts that I use with all of my students.
Next I introduced ZimmerTwins.com to the students. There is a short tutorial cartoon on the site that takes you through the process of creating an animation. It is well done and the site is easy to use so students tended to have few or no questions after viewing the cartoon.
As was appropriate with a new tool, most children needed to play around with it, try some silly things before they could get down to creating their cartoon. However, by the end of the first session many children had found their direction and their movies were beginning to take shape. You can view a draft of a cartoon by clicking on the picture below.
Joe's movie in progress
The children found the activity engrossing. The room was almost silent as they worked. As they left at the end of class they eagerly asked if they could keep working on their cartoons at home.
In this pilot, I have so far used it for one class period with a third grade class, a fourth grade class and two fifth grade classes. It was a real stretch for the third graders to tell a story that made sense and had a beginning, middle and an end. Only the strongest writers were being very successful but all of them were enjoying the activity. I think they could be much more successful using this site to share something they have learned.
Fourth graders were more successful. They were working on creating educational science or social studies cartoons. As is appropriate, their cartoons are more basic so far than the ones created by fifth graders.
I have used it with two fifth grade classes. They are the most successful so far but at this point, many are lacking in educational content. I am not worried. I think by the end of the next class period most will be dramatically better.
Even though at this point most of their cartoons contain too many gratuitous actions, such as fainting or teleporting, many students are starting to see the power of those same tools. For example, a few students used teleporting to go back in time to teach a history lesson.
I told the children the cartoons could be funny as long as they taught us accurate information. When I see how eagerly children watch each other’s cartoons-in-progress, I think that these little cartoons may indeed get used by next year’s teachers as one of the many tools they use to teach their content.
Equally importantly, I’d say this activity is at the top of Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and fits neatly into our tech framework which is based on ISTE’s current NETS-S. It is a higher order thinking task to use the limited characters, props and settings to teach real content. The children are really working hard — and loving doing it.
A few details about the site.
- It is moderated. When students save a movie, it does not appear online until it has been viewed and approved. One of my students logged in from home and posted something inappropriate. I was notified via email and also warned that the account would be closed if that behavior persisted. The site clearly posts what is not allowed, such as swearing and violence.
- Members are able to rate the cartoons and leave comments. I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of the site until my students started receiving comments. They haven’t seen them yet (except for one of my students who wrote her own comment, something along the lines of “Great movie! One of my favorites!”). Next class period I will talk with them about that feature and we will arrive at guidelines for leaving comments.
- There is a Zimmer Twins TV show on qubo. That is the origin of these characters. I’ve only found qubo mentioned in a few places on the site and it is mentioned once in the tutorial cartoon. Other than that, there is no advertising.
- If you are in the US, there is a chance that your cartoon could be shown on the TV show.
- Beneath each cartoon is a collabowrite button that allows any member of the site to copy and edit someone else’s cartoon. The original is left untouched.
- If students forget to login, they cannot save their cartoon. Saved cartoons can be further edited by their creator at any time.
- The cartoons have a fairly short time limit which my students have gotten around by creating a part 2, part 3, etc.
So what do you think of this site. Do you see a place in your curriculum for using the ZimmerTwins movie creator? Please share your ideas.
[UPDATE on 6 April 2010 : ZimmerTwins just changed their model. Now we are unable to continue editing after we save unless we become a paid subscriber. Understandable, but very disappointing since this was such a motivating and engaging tool.]
Back in 2005 I began playing around with wikis, trying to discover which one best suited my needs. Over the intervening years I’ve enjoyed watching the different platforms mature. Now that I am a technology coordinator, my criteria have changed because I need an enterprise-level wiki solution.
Before I started this job, I don’t think I even knew what enterprise-level wiki solution meant so let me explain. If I only need a wiki for myself or a small group of people, my needs are tremendously different than if I need to be able to create tens, even hundreds of wikis that will be edited by thousands of people. All of a sudden the ease with which you can create and manage accounts and wikis becomes important.
Other considerations had to do with advertisements, privacy settings, and whether or not students needed an email address to have an account. Drill down control is also important. It would be nice to be able to set permissions at the page level rather than at just the wiki level. That way, different groups could have full rights to edit some pages and few or no rights to edit other pages.
I’ve been using WetPaint, Wikispaces and PB Works for years. I’ve used all three with students and with staff. Wetpaint is still my favorite in terms of how it looks, the templates it has, and how well the tables work. Until this term, we have been using it for our parent conference sign ups and it has worked exceptionally well.
Unfortunately, they don’t offer corporate plans. If we want ad-free wikis we’d need to pay for each one separately, and there is no way to administer them centrally. Wetpaint used to offer free ad-free wikis for K-12 use but they quit doing that. We have no way to create accounts for children.They also were mis-applying the COPPA rules and shut down one of my teachers’ wikis even though the parents created the accounts, not the children.
We did not want to host the wiki ourselves so that left only Wikispaces and PB Works as options. Each has some nifty features that the other lacks. Neither is as pretty as Wetpaint and the tables aren’t quite as nice, but they can meet our needs. In the end, it felt like a roll of the dice but we went with Wikispaces since they were going to give us more a bit more for our money. Since then PB Works has introduced a new rate for schools so each are equally viable. You can view the Wikispaces plans here and the PB Works ones here.
We are due to start parent conference sign up next week, so we had to quickly shift the conference wiki from Wetpaint to our new Wikispaces.net account. Unlike Edublogs, Wikispaces doesn’t send you a nifty manual to get you started after they take your payment. We had to stumble our way through setting it up. In my next blog a future post I’ll share with you what we have learned so far.
Photo Credits: Untitled by Goose frabaaa
I have some friends and family going through rough times right now, but watching this UN Flickr set of photos from post-earthquake Haiti makes everything else look easy. As I watched, I kept thinking, “Where do you even start?”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/sets/72157623084697787/show/
Thank you to Wes Fryer for tweeting the link: “This Flickr set from the UN of the Jan2010 Haiti earthquake is sobering and compelling http://ow.ly/14uZ4″I have finally taken the plunge and moved my blog to my own domain. If you have followed me from my old Blogger blog to this one, thank you.
In my last post on that blog, I explained how easy it was to move my blog to WordPress at my own domain. My domain host company, BlueHost made it incredibly easy. It took the clicks of a few buttons and it was done.
As you can see, I haven’t had time to make the blog look attractive. That can be my task for next weekend.
I am preparing a three-part workshop for elementary teachers to familiarize them with different tech tools they could use to support their students as writers.
I am just getting started planning it. I know I will share some tools currently being used by teachers at my school. For example, one teacher has her students posting their poetry to a discussion board in Blackboard. I am amazed by the depth of the comments the classmates are leaving for the poets.
Another teacher is using Google Docs for working on mechanics and writing skills. The children follow a link from his website and then join in the activity, such as expanding a sentence, writing a better ending.
One class has research and then storyboarded movies on cyberbullying. Another uses Movie Maker to have the children create illustrated movies of their poems.
We have teachers using VoiceThread to create student book reviews. Others using Shelfari for students to recommend books to classmates. (NOTE: Most of these were not my ideas. We have a great staff so I am constantly learning from them.)
This will be a three part workshop that should show increasingly more advanced uses with each new sessions. I would very much like to crowd source it. Please complete the survey below to tell me your ideas for using tech to support, enhance, nurture student writers.
I know the survey doesn’t work well with this Blogger template. Yet another reason why I need to move to WordPress. Please hit return any time you are in danger of typing off the page. [P.S. I moved this to WordPress on my own domain, but the form wouldn't play nicely with most themes so I am using the current theme, which like Blogger, is too narrow for it.]
The last question is optional. However, if you give me your name I will be able to thank you in the credits of my presentation.
When you are done, please scroll to the end and press the submit button.
Thank you.
About an hour ago I was trolling the headlines for information on the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti today. The reports were not yet very informative other than that this is a huge disaster which caused much damage and loss of life.
Research done, I was about to turn off the computer for the evening when I saw the following tweet from Clarence Fisher:
I clicked on the usernames and began to read. And read. I was especially moved by following the picture that unfolded from @troylivesay’s tweets. He is now up to 964 followers. I wonder how many he had prior to today.
Go ahead and give this use of social networking a try. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, go to http://twitter.com/troylivesay and read his tweets there. Let the on-the-ground descriptions combine with what you hear from traditional news sources to give you a more complete picture. Let the tweets put a human face on the news.
I’ve seen links to this video zooming around the Twitterverse all weekend so I finally took a look. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth your time as well.
Last year my principal recognized that our schedule lacked time for tech professional development. There were few built in times, and teachers have so many commitments that they rarely can attend offerings after school.
- AV – using our Vado cameras and our digital voice recorders, using that media in projects
- Interactive Whiteboard - helping teachers create start using the new ActivInspire software to create their own IWB resources
- OneNote – using Microsoft Office OneNote 2007, a program that is used extensively by our admin team
- Web Presence – helping teachers create an easy to manage web presence to use with their class (e.g. a blog, a wiki)
- Wikis – what they are, how to use them with your students, how to start one
One of my fifth grade classes will start blogging soon. As they learn about blogging, I want them to visit well-written student blogs so they can learn what a blog is and how to comment appropriately.
