Allanah's Appleby Showcase

Pete's Year Five and Six class have been working extensively creating music with Garageband. William and Josh have created this jingle that will be played on a local radio station.

I have been asked to do a couple of PD sessions with local teachers on what a podcast is and how to create one. Some of the teachers at the meeting will not have Apple computers so this becomes a bit of a problem. So I set out to create a podcast on my PC. I used Audacity to record audio and then imported it in to Movie Maker for adding the graphics.

I have republished this podcast at a higher bit rate (whatever that is) in order to hopefully have the thing play completley when it subscribes into iTunes. Fingers crossed!

After a few wrong turns I got thing working. Thanks for the techie tips from Paul at Cefn Fforest School in South Wales.

Ruby and Lara did such a good job on this digital poetry production that they deserve a wider audience. Their voices have wonderful expression and are nice & clear. The music is from

http://freeplaymusic.com/

and is copyright free. Freeplay music is an excellent resource of quality music.

Mrs Pritchard does always come back for more.

:-)

Jamie and Sam J worked on this podcast about Pete. All of the teachers were very co-operative in letting us come and photograph them while they were working.

To change a Quicktime movie into one that is OK for podcasting you need to export it for IPod settings. One day I will get a video IPod nano!

Jessica and Emily collaborated to make this vidcast. Notice how they used the Ken Burns effect to make the photos appear as though they are moving. Ken Burns was given the job of making a movie about the American Civil War but he only had still photos to work with so he gradually zoomed in on them to make them look more interesting and to focus more on the subject.

Mrs Pritchard was a great subject of the vidcast.

We have been doing some great digital poetry. Digital poetry is when you write a poem and then take photos to illustrate your poem. We would have like to make the photos move but some of the laptops were playing up. Gloria and Georgia did a great job of this poem about all the wonderful things Mrs Murphy does to help us around the school.

We had the pleasure of being able to interview Dean Schneider, a New Zealand nature photographer, who had come to visit with us for an afternoon to learn more about the sorts of things we are doing with computers in our classroom. We were surprised to learn that Dean had taken the photographs for the school reader 'Helping the Hoiho' which was Dillon's favourite when he was younger. I think all NZ children would recognise that book.

We have been busy exploring websites that support our learning. This website is a really good one with lots of maths resources that can be used in a variety of ways.

Note that this is a vodcast in that it is more than a series of photos to illustrate the oral text. At one stage it zooms in in a similar way to the ULearn vodcast. Another thing to note is the soundtrack. I made this by using an audio hijacking programme to record the Firefox sounds I made by running the mouse over link boxes on the US Public Broadcasting Kids website!

Instead of the usual story of, "What we did in the holidays," we made a podcast instead. A much more fun exercise in that everyone had a turn in front of the microphone. It took lots of practise to get our voices sounding nice and clear and with plenty of expression.

I am trying a new something that I have never tried before- making a video podcast about my trip to the Ulearn Conference in Christchurch in the September school holidays. It worked!!! I am so proud of myself!!!! It is 10MB so you lot on dial-up will be sad. But hey!! Pretty clever stuff- what do you think!

Thanks for the encouraging comments from you good folks but I had delete them when I re-did the podcast with the copyright free music track. Jack Johnson had to go in order that I set a good example!

The file is a biggie but I suggest you subscribe with ITunes by clicking on the iTunes logo and then you can watch it over and over without having to stream it each time!