Any suggestions for our graphic novels? Last spring we just made these in PowerPoint, which was rather basic, but went really well. I actually found that the sixth-graders lacked skills using PowerPoint, so it was helpful for them to to try to use it in a more creative way. We've looked at Pixton, but it requires you to pay as you start to dig deeper in it. My 6th grade colleague has suggested doing Google Presentations. I'm just not sure what platform will work best - the graphic novels are about historical figures and movements and so we include a lot of cited digital primary sources in them. Thanks for your help!
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Hey everybody! Right now I am teaching my teacher candidates at Lincoln Elementary School in Cedar Falls as part of a Professional Development School Partnership. We have class at the school and my students work approximately 3 hours a week with the sixth-grade students and teachers there. Our goals this semester are blogging for reader response, using the iPads and laptops, creating digital graphic novels, and doing image-enhanced podcasts. Right now we are doing literature circles and the sixth graders are blogging their reading responses. It's been a bit of a rough start because one class of sixth graders has been blogging for several months (they are great!) and the other class is just getting started now with us, so my students who are new to this are having to think through it like teachers. A great learning experience, but a bit challenging considering that they are more novice than I expected and we are using kidblog.org and it hasn't been working well lately.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Sarah:
ReplyDeleteI have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Would you be willing to share with the group links for us to learn about these new strategies? Would you be willing to TEACH the rest of us to do this?
Dianna
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteYou may want to check into iBooks Author if you have access to either laptops or desktops for your students on a regular basis. It is a textbook creation app that is free for Mac. While it is for "textbooks" the term textbook is now beginning to stretch to include multimedia so it may work for your digital novel project.
How the overall process would work is that your students would create their novels using the iBooks Author app on a laptop and then you can upload them to a website where anyone can download them (even publish to iTunesU if you wanted) and then your students could read everyone's novel on the school's iPads (books created with iBooks Author are only able to be consumed on an iPad) using the iBooks app (also free).
If this is something you'd like to try out, let me know and I'll help you through the process. Also, if you don't think something like this will work, I can keep looking for other websites and apps to use.
Dan
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd give you some resources to help with blogging. I enjoy blogging and have been doing it for a few years now and have found it to be very fulfilling. (Shameless self-promotion: You can read my blog at http://dmourlam.wordpress.com) Here are some things I've found to be successful with blogs:
-I'm reflective about what I'm writing about
-I write for myself most of the time, making it more personal and interesting to me, which should be the point
-I started by keeping them short and to the point until I was more comfortable sharing with the world
-I don't try to rush a post, because if I can't take the time to think deeply about blogs, I'm not going to be happy with the result
I'm not sure if any of that will help, but here is a wiki that has some blogging resources on it: http://weblogged.wikispaces.com/Weblogs+in+Schools. Scroll down the page to find other blogs and resources that might help.
If there is anything I can do to help facilitate blogging with your students let me know.
Dan
I'd be happy to share this work with you all! Dan - We have access to iPads, but not Mac laptops (only the mini PCs), so I think creating these through iBooks would be difficult given this constraint. Please let me know if you find anything else. My sixth-grade teacher colleague suggested VoiceThread, but I'm not sure if that is a fit for what we are doing. We'd have to make the slides in ppt or something and then import them in and then talk over them. VoiceThread wouldn't include text, would it? I guess we could reconceptualize this and go that route...?
ReplyDeleteJoining this discussion a bit late, but here are a few thoughts. Google Docs presentations are much easier to share online (they are already online), and the presentation editor in Google Docs was recently updated & improved. I hear Cedar Falls just recently adopted Google Apps, so this might be a good opportunity for students and teachers to learn more about using the tools (and might deter some teachers from wanting to take on too many other new technologies in the near future).
ReplyDeleteVoicethreads offer a nice way to capture students' voices. However, your needs may exceed the features provided in the free version (maximum amount of voice comments, etc).
Magda has used ComicLife in her digital imaging class. She likes it, and I see Wendy posted a good example in her Jan 26 post.