Webcams Set Learning On Fire!

There are so many productive things that we can do with a good digital camera in the classroom. Unfortunately, we all don't have class sets of digital cameras to use. I would argue that the lack of digital cameras opens up opportunities that only webcams can provide, and we have we have at least one webcam in every classroom, the teacher laptop webcam.  If we bring in a campus netbook cart, iMac, Manda or Innovation Station, then the possibilities continue to grow.

District webcam-enabled computers all already have some image capture software installed.  Macs: Photobooth, iPad2: Photobooth, netbooks: CyberLink YouCam, Manda pc: AMCap,  Windows laptop: Dell Webcam Central.   Also available on all district computers are your installed apps like ComicLife, iMovie, MovieMaker, and Photoshop which also let you capture images directly into those applications to be edited or used as needed.  (Stay tuned for future post on greenscreening in the classroom!)

Fire effect from htmlchat.net/99/snapshot

Sometimes, we want a little extra creativity in our photo applications or we can't find the installed applications.  Web2.0 sites come to the rescue again with online webcam image capture sites. There are many out there, but nice ones include:
* http://htmlchat.net/99/snapshot  - has special effects
* http://cameroid.com/snap.php   - allows you to create your own gallery online and has special effects

Perhaps you are at home and need an installable option right away.  Available for both Mac and Windows, http://www.manycam.com can be downloaded and installed for free.

Webcams can play a nice roll in the classroom. Capture student work, pose students for illustrated stories, videotape oral reports, the list goes on!  Engage students with camera technology and odds are, they will come up with other authentic uses as well.

How do you use cameras in your classroom instruction?

Paperslide Videos! Easy Way To Use Tech AND Show Learning!

This was one of my favorite Discovery Educator Network (DEN) sessions that I've attended over my many years teaching. The DEN likes to put teachers in the students' shoes sometimes and making Paperslide videos was a fun activity, engaging activity, only took 20 minutes before we were sharing, and was totally centered around a specific teaching objective.


Paper Slide Video: Solids, Liquids and Gasses from Heather Hurley on Vimeo.

Basically, Paperslide Videos are nothing more than sheets of papers that slide under the view of a recording camera. It's all done in one take, with no editing. It could be a nice way to introduce Powerpoint in that you aren't having students just jam 150 words on to a page, but they must rely on visual literacy to depict the lines from the song or their spoken lecture.  There are no faces or names in the video, so the product could go immediately onto the class blog/wiki to be shared with other students and parents. But best of all, the students are rehearsing and creating the pictures, which means in order to teach the objective, they must learn it first.

Dr. Lodge McCammon, (with the Friday Institute out of NC State University),  brings this to teachers quite frequently and he works extensively with the fine people of Discovery Education. He actually uses Paperslide Videos to explain the concept (the top video) and how to make one.

What can you do with Paperslide Videos? Some teachers use them just to capture a teacher or student-directed lecture video.  That is a great first step through the door, but another very engaging product is to make a Paperslide Video to illustrate a song.  Dr. Lodge has a lot of songs already on Discovery Education (search 'lodge' and media type 'song' to find 45 tunes organized by standard/subject/etc) or visit his other blog.

Check out what Mr. C's class did with "On The Numberline" in one class period with his Austin ISD students.

Lastly, excellent teacher in the DEN, Heather Hurley, shared a Paperslide they did on States of Matter that uses one of Lodge's songs! She used a video-sharing site, Vimeo, to share this with her colleagues and parents.  I embedded this video at the top of this post to catch your attention!

Now, the same songs can also be used in a very kinesthetic environment by having students act out the lyrics instead of drawing them.  While not a Paperslide video, the same concepts apply and the time for the product is still maintained within part of a class period.  Check out how students showed the Order of Operations in this music video.

Create your own Paperslide Videos!!   Leave a comment below with a link to one your class made. We'd love to see it.  

Taking Pictures in the Classroom! pt 3

In this last part of the series, I wanted to share some different avenues and alternatives for sharing instructional photography with students in the classroom. There is no way to cover every option, so this will hopefully open the door for greater discussion and sharing.

First off, we've discussed taking photos and getting them onto a local network. What can we do with those photos? One uniform tool that all Macs and Windows computers have in AISD is MS Powerpoint. Students can access the teacher's folder containing the photos and insert a photo onto a Powerpoint slide.  A simple criteria could be to point out 4 concepts from the lesson by drawing a line arrow to them, adding text that describes them, and saving it back to the server. Slides could be combined into one class presentation or students can take turns adding a new slide to the teacher's presentation.  Either way, the software is already on the computer, the draw tools are simple, and the students have a quick and easy way to demonstrate comprehension of the instructional goals that day.

The other computer-based idea that is often over-looked is the use of the Comic Life application available on all Mac and Windows computers. (Granted, you have have to install it, but both students and teachers have the ability to do that through district network-install tools. Ask your campus technology leadership for more information about that.)  Comic Life will access your network-saved photos and let you create graphic documents that use text, engaging graphics, and your photos to tell a story or demonstrate a point. Comic Life also can access your webcam and take the pictures directly from the camera into your Comic.

The internet includes many sites that allow you to upload something to it, edit the media, and then either save it back to your computer or publish it for public viewing.  These interactive sites make up much of the Web2.0 environment. (Web1.0 was considered the mostly access-and-view web and less interactive.) The benefit to most Web2.0 sites is that they are platform independent. I should be able to do the same thing on that site regardless of the type of computer I am using. (The recent exceptions are mobile devices that don't have Adobe Flash capabilities.)

One such Web2.0 site that works well for classroom photography is Picnik.com. Students can simply go to the site, upload a picture from their computer, edit it with filters/stickers/text/etc, and then save it back to their computer.  The great thing about Picnik is that it requires no login or account to be created. Simply upload, edit, and save back to your computer.  The graphic tools are easy to use and the creative aspects are truly engaging.

A great site for sharing photos is Posterous.com, now called Posterous Spaces. This site is great for sharing and discussing photos, docs, or other media with a class. The recent update to their services gives you a greater ability to share only with certain people, even people who don't have a Posterous Spaces account. Cell phone users can share a photo to the class site by emailing the photo and a thought-provoking comment to your Posterous email account and it's instantly up for classroom discussion.

Mobile devices also present some interesting options for using photography during instruction. There are apps for both Android and iOS that allow you to take a picture, edit and then share it with others.  I presented one such app, PhotoPad for iOS, during a recent Intel Webinar on Mobile Apps in the Classroom. (The teacher discussion can be found online!) PhotoPad gets extra credit from me because it uses the photos on the iPad, lets you draw on them, and then I could email the photo out to be shared. Combining that with Posterous makes graphic representations of classroom instruction easily shared with others for discussion. (Here's a silly example.)

This list could go on for days!  I know there will be future posts about the classroom webcam used with instruction, but this just gets us started.

Do you have experience using the camera during classroom instruction? What camera did you use? What software or website did you find helpful?

Taking Pictures in the Classroom! pt 2

One of my favorite tools in the classroom is the camera.  In Part 1, we shared some of the choices teachers may have for accessing cameras in the classroom.  So, I've captured the photo. Now what do I do with it?

Probably my biggest goal for taking photos in the classroom would be to share that photo with a particular audience (students, parents, or sister class in another part of the world). The first devices discussed in Part 1 were devices already connected to a network. Laptops, netbooks, document cameras connected to an Innovation Station, all of those are on a network and the images can be saved to a district server for easy access by the students.

Digital cameras present an alternative with other options. First, the easiest is to share the photos directly into a projector. Most cameras come with an AV cable with RCA/composite (red/white/yellow) plugs. A teacher can connect these camera to the projector and instantly share the photos with the class on the full-size classroom screen. Otherwise, the images will need to be transferred to a computer via it's USB connection cable or by inserting the camera's SD memory card into a computer-connected card reader.  Connecting the camera directly sometimes requires software or drivers to recognize the camera as a device by the computer.  Using a card-reader will allow the computer to access the saved photos as if the SD memory card were an external storage device, which it is at that point.  AISD Windows laptops and netbooks have a built-in card reader. There are also small $5-$10 USB adapters that let you plug the SD card into the USB port on any computer.

Cell phone image transfer can be a bit more challenging since there are many different types of phones and ways that each are able to get the photo to a computer. Often, the camera may come with a USB cable just like a digital camera, but let's focus on the easier and more authentic way of sharing the camera phone pictures.  Being that they are already always on a network, phones present you with the opportunity to share immediately to many different Web 2.0 photo sharing sites. Teachers can quickly learn how to manage the classroom online resource so that the photos are shared in a responsible and curriculum-supporting way.

The last post in this series will deal with the instructional use of sharing photos and using some easy Web 2.0 tools to do so.

What tips would you have for teachers for getting photos to a networked location when sharing?

Taking Pictures in the Classroom! pt 1

One of my favorite tools in the classroom is the camera.  Whether it is a document camera, digital camera or camera phone, the ability to capture learning as it happens makes it possible to draw on that experience any number of times afterward.  In AISD, most classrooms have multiple avenues to take advantage of cameras during instruction.

Dude, Where's My Camera? For starters, nearly every classroom has a digital camera since every classroom has a teacher with a laptop. District-issued teacher laptops all have webcams above the monitor. Every campus also has quite a large number of student netbooks that also have webcams installed.

One of my favorite classroom instruments is the normal digital camera. I'm a fan of the Canon Elph Powershots because of the connecting to almost any computer without adding drivers and because of the high quality still and video shots you can get for not too much money.  Many teachers in AISD have access to a Canon digital camera, but forget that it also takes video!

While we are covering small and relatively inexpensive devices, there has been a growth in the desire for smart-devices in the classroom. More classrooms have camera-enabled iPod Touches, iPads, and a few Android tablets as well.

Don't forget the other camera in almost every room, the cell phone camera! It's easy to whip that out and take a quick photo or video of an instructional sample that you wish to share. More schools across the country are starting to relax the 'no cell phone' rules for students (a , b). Instead of banning them because they could be misused, they are putting them into instructional practice and modeling appropriate phone behavior for students.  Students are using phones to complete quick online quizzes, post questions to the class website, perform quick internet research, or even share photographed examples of the curricular concept that day.

The use of document cameras in the classroom is finally starting to mature from the 'digital overhead' use to being a live demonstration and media capture tool. Almost two-thirds of classrooms in all of our schools have doc cams already attached to a projector.  Many other schools have realized the instructional use and purchased more with their own budgets. The Lumens D265C has been the district standard since the creation of the Innovation Stations, but just about every document camera on the market now provides you with the ability to capture still or video images.


What is your favorite classroom camera resource?
The next post in this series will look at software that can be used to get photos from camera to computer.
Photo credit:  http://www.dvguru.com/media/2005/12/Cell_Phone_Camera.jpg