Streamlined lessons in pictures

A few months ago, my students and I went on a field trip to the local recycling plant. As we neared the end of our tour I realized I forgot my camera and we were in a prime photo location. Without a camera on hand, I asked one of the student teachers with me if he could take a picture of us with his cell phone (I’ve got a grandma phone with no camera). After doing so he emailed me the picture and I later uploaded it to my class picasa web albums account. It dawned on me after the fact that he could have emailed the picture directly to my picasa account.

Using just your cell phone’s camera, you can take pictures and have them on the web for instant access to your students. I like to have students act out or demonstrate concepts in pictures then put everything together into a presentation. To access the pictures for presentations, students pull the pictures from our class picasa account.

Step 1: Log in to your picasa account and click on Settings. In the ‘General’ section, check the box that says “Allow me to upload photos by email.” You’ll be prompted to enter a special word that will give you an email address that follows the pattern user.special_word@picasaweb.com (you can change the special-word at anytime).

Step 2: Snap a picture and email to the address you set up. You’ll see the picture you sent show up in an album called “Drop Box.” Click on this album and then go to Edit–>Album Properties.  From there, set the share options to Public.  This allows your students access to the pictures you shot in class.  The default setting is private, so no one will see your pictures unless you change it to public.  You can change this back at any time.

The great thing about Picasa is that it connects to so many other things – such as Animoto.  From Animoto, you can tie into your Picasa account and have a movie ready for you in about 5 minutes.  Here is a movie that one of my students did at a presentation we did for some education undergrads.  The pictures were shot by other students on their cell phones and the video footage was shot with a digital camera.

Student made movies in one period – Part II

In my last post on student made movies I discussed x-tranormal.  The application itself (web or software based) is very easy to use, but getting students up and running on it can present some challenges (accounts, # of computers, downloads, etc.).  If you’d like to make student movies, but need something a little simpler, the answer is just a digital camera away.

Armed with any basic digital camera and a $5 card reader, you can produce student movies and post them securely to the Internet in a single period or less. This method bypasses all editing, but is the quickest and easiest way to get a student movie online.  It’s easy to forget that a digital camera does a lot more than take pictures.  Here’s how to get the most out of it (apologies if my steps are too elementary):

1. Switch your digital camera to movie mode.

2. Have students act out, present, or demonstrate the concept.  Try and keep the movie to a minute or less, otherwise film in increments.

3. Take the card out of your camera, put it in the card-reader, and plug it into your computer.  The card reader allows you to select a single item instead of downloading the entire contents of the card onto your computer.

4. Upload movie to YouTube if you aren’t as concerned about privacy or upload to drop.io (more on this in a future post) and set a password if you want to keep it private.  You can also make YouTube videos private, but it becomes more difficult to share with others who don’t have accounts.

One of the advantages of uploading to YouTube is that it gives you some basic titling capabilities.  If you want to add captions or a note to a video, it’s a relatively simple process.  The video below was shot, uploaded, and titled in about 15 minutes.

If you’ve got an iPhone or other smartphone that syncs to YouTube, you can do all this with just your phone.

Student made movies in one period – Part I

X-tranormal has been buzzed about quite a bit in the blogosphere for the last year or so.  I’d checked it out several times, but hadn’t considered using it until I saw a student produced x-tranormal movie a few weeks ago.  It inspired me to give it a whirl with students in my geography class this week.

X-tranormal is an animated video editing environment that is very easy to use.  Recently, they’ve added a desktop version called “State” that is a free download.  The online version works very well, but the desktop version is supposed to be faster and doesn’t require a login.  In the online version, click “Make Movies,” choose your character and setting, and you are ready to go.  All you have to do at this point is write or copy and paste some text into the text box and hit the action button.   A few minutes later and you’ll have your own animated movie.   You can easily add motion, hand movements, and expression to your characters with some drag and drop buttons.
Student movie on Bolivia

For their assignments, my students had to write a news report about a country in South America.  They did most of their research on CIA Factbook, a site about etiquette in countries around the world, and New York Times  search.  In x-tranormal, I started a movie template for each student and logged them into my account once I approved their script.  From there, they could paste in their script and change the movie however they liked.

The students were able to figure out how to do things on their own and almost everyone completed their movie by the time class let out (though a few didn’t want to leave the lab).   As I suspected might happen however, many of the students lost their movies because they were all logged into my account at one time.   It wasn’t a terrible loss because everyone had already saved their written report on google docs so it was easy to fix.  Despite most of the movies not saving, a few survived and I’ve posted one of them above.

If you use x-tranormal with a class, keep these things in mind.

1. Make sure students have their script written beforehand.  It will be handy in case something goes wrong and they can get to the editing faster.

2. It’s probably best to have students create their own accounts (if they are over 13) or have multiple accounts for yourself.  This eliminates the problem of lost movies, but makes them more difficult to access and monitor.  Also, you could just download the desktop version and students could use it without accounts.

3. Beware that the homepage may have some questionable content on it.  There was a Tiger Woods parody on the main page that caught some students’ attention and was a distraction.