Allanah's Appleby Showcase

This week was a very busy one for us at Appleby School. Our senior classes performed on stage with Suzanne Prentice who is a famous New Zealand entertainer.

She has been awarded a Queen's Honour for her music services.

The sound tracks on this podcast are of Moturoa class singing a couple of Suzanne's Christmas themed songs. We recorded this part back in the classroom.

Our performance was 'wicked'.

By Braden (Year Four)

1.6MB 3 minutes 7 seconds

Each year Pete leads a school band at Appleby School. The popularity of the band is evidenced by the growing number of instrumuments and children that are keen to have a go.

Today they are getting ready to go on tour around some of the local schools. We were their practice audience. The band's name is Metamorphic. See how far they have come on their journey to musical stardom!

Aren't they a talented group.

13MB 2 minutes 16 seconds

For some unknown reason some of our laptop animations in Kid Pix ceased to work.

After a little web browsing I found a fix and a reason why!

After updating Quicktime the newer version allows for Flash animations to be turned off or on. It defaults to off. You need to go to Quicktime and switch them back on again.

This podcast will show you how to do that. Hope it will be useful.

I got the idea into my head about a week ago that I would like to be able to do a 'How To' podcast using moving graphics capture from my computer screen. I had seen a couple of other people do it and don't like to feel like I am missing out. LOL. Tonight, Greg, our ICTPD national facilitator, gave me a link to TILT TV for educators. This was 'just-in-time' learning.

From TILT TV http://tilttv.blogspot.com/ I got a couple of links and I even fired up my PC to see if I could do a screen capture from there but it was all too difficult so I gave up.

Then I tried the Apple version using SnapzProX2. Great. Nice and simple and the video was saved as a Quicktime which was quickly imported into iMovie to add a voice track and music from Freeplay.

I am really pleased with how it turned out although I would suggest that a viewing in iTunes would be clearer as the screen view will be bigger than viewing in podomatic.

Enjoy! I am quite proud of this little effort.

Cefn Fforest SChool in Wales has inspired us to have a go at a live vodcast with real people. We had a great opportunity to do this as the Year Fives were away today at the Inter-School Athletic Sports so we only had a small class of 18 Year Fours.

We looked at some of the things we like at Appleby School. The vodcast was put together quickly with the minimum of editing but was lots of fun to have a go at!

It is 10MB big so if you have a slow connection you may like to have a cuppa and do a couple of other things while you wait.

We look forward to being on the Loop with a 36,000k modem next year!!!

By accident really we found that we could upgrade Kid Pix 3 to allow us to make a podcast using Kid Pix instead of our usual Garageband. Once we got the hang of it it was a piece of cake. You just make a picture that has sound recorded on to it and then make a slideshow of those files and then export the whole lot to Ipod.

We can't edit our sound bytes like we can in Garageband but the end result is great with more of the children's creativity expressed in their own art work taken with a background of iconic Nelson photographs.

It does sound soft to start with but it gets stronger later in the podcast.

Cool transitions, eh???

Our podcast is getting itself noticed by other educational podcasters around the globe. It makes the world seem like a smaller, more connected place!

This week we changed the format of the podcast a little and had more of a conversation about Jane Evans' art. Jane is a famous Nelson artist who is known for using bold colours to express emotions and feelings in her art work.

We had a class trip to the art gallery to learn about her art works last week.

In this podcast Jackson C, Elliott and Jillian all make a contribution.

We have been learning about logos and how they help to sell a place or product. We are looking to changing our school logo in the future as well.

We used very advanced technology this time because we interviewed Teri, a student from nearby Brightwater School, using Skype, the free internet telephone application. We never actually left our classroom.

Teri explained about her school's logo very well. Thank you Teri. What a cool way to interview people who are in far off places.

One more thing of note! A clever techie kind of thing! When the podcast is playing if you click on where it says Brightwater School at the bottom of the photo you will stop the podcast and be taken to Brightwater's web site! I bet you didn't know that!!!!!!!

Nikki's New Entrant class have been learning about the Lynley Dodd's books. Lynley Dodd is a very well known New Zealand author.

Slinky Malinki is a cheeky and friendly cat by day and master stealer by night.

Each child drew a picture of Slinky Malinki in Kid Pix and then recorded a rich caption to go with it. Nikki put it all together into a slideshow & movie and I turned it into a podcast. Quite a collaborative effort.

Well done Waimea class.