Frames 4 Is Fabulous!

On Friday, we had the laptops for a period and because we will be doing a large number of media projects this year, I wanted everyone trained on Frames 4.

Frame 4 is an easy to use animation software program available on all the school computers. (I tried my hand at it just last week! Students rightly noted that my intro slides were TOO FAST. Students, you know intuitively what makes good media! We will be exploring this further, articulating the way media effectively (or ineffectively) communicates meaning--which is part of the Media Literacy curriculum expectation for both 7 & 8).

Some of the students were more familiar with this program than others. Essentially, I went through all the features, demonstrating how to use the software, then expected a 4 to 5 slide animation from students as they 'test drove' the features. It could be on anything, as long as it showed movement.

All I can say is...WOW! We have some extremely talented animators in our class. In just this short free play period, they came up with some amazing stuff! I can't wait to transform these into web-ready videos and post them for all to see!

Bitstrip: Class Portrait

Today we got to go back into bitstripsforschools.com with the laptops. Everyone now has an avatar. Here is the completed class portrait!

WELCOME TO MRS. J's CREATIVE COMIC CREATORS!

We are working on some additional writing projects using this comic creation site...so stay tuned! Student samples will be posted!

Writing with Tech (Email, Bitstrips) and thinking about Multiple Intelligences

As you can see, we are a creative bunch.

Today we had the laptops for the full morning period. Students are provided by our school board with usernames and an email account.

EMAILING

Students logged on, and emailed me their writing responses:

-identify the main idea of the Blue Jays video we watched (a short clip on Brett Lawrie's homerun in their game against the Red Sox this past week).
-provide 5 words describing the mood of the Blue Jays video
-tell me the answer to the questions from yesterday: 'who wrote your favourite song,  TV show or movie?' (this also necessitated a google search)
-tell me one goal for reading &/or writing

This activity gave students the chance to explore the school email service & write short answer pieces.

BITSTRIPS FOR SCHOOLS
We then created student bitstrip accounts. Bitstripsforschools.com is a closed site where students can create and share comics (moderated by me). Today, most students  were able to create their avatar. Some also got started on their first assignment "Introduce Yourself Through A Comic". We will continue with bitstrips next week and throughout the year.

I am a big fan of bitstrips and have included several of my comics on this site already.

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

This poster is missing Nature Smart! And I added Tech Smart.

Multiple intelligence is a concept from Howard Gardner and it describes the wide variety of ways that people learn or are 'intelligent'.

In class today, students identified which was their strongest or most predominate skill or 'smartness': tech smart (which I added to the original list because I think it needs to be there), body smart, picture smart, self smart, people smart, music smart, logic smart, picture smart, self smart (and nature smart). They did this by moving around the class room to the sign with their smartness on it. (Interestingly, the tech smart folks gravitated to the computer as they did this task (and we're online, even though they weren't supposed to be. They just couldn't seem to help themselves with the laptop being on & right there close by!), while the body smart folks could hardly stand still beneath their sign!). (That behaviour just proved to everyone that they'd made the right choice!)

They then had to self-reflect on this choice and write a few sentences as to why they thought this was their main area of smartness (what examples of it are in their life currently in the form of hobbies or activities?) and also to think about career examples that align with their talents & interests.

We will continue our exploration of learning preference and identity as the year progress.