Myna – A Web Based Audio Tool

Are you looking for an easy way for your students to begin creating audio files for podcasts?  Than Myna by Aviary may be the tool for you.  Myna allows you to remix audio tracks, apply sound effects, and record your voice which will make creating your next podcast even easier than before.  It is completely web-based so there is no need to download software onto your computer making it easier for students to create podcasts from any computer.

Editing capabilities include:

• trim, loop, stretch and reverse your audio clips
• width editable loop points
• interactive time stretch capabilities
• easily add fade-ins, fade-outs
• pan from left to right
• add non-destructive effects to your audio clips including pitch change, reverb, delay, and parametric EQ

To learn more about Myna visit http://aviary.com/tools/myna.   We would love to hear how you use this tool in your classroom.

Collaborative Tools for Learning Conference
Friday, November 13
Macomb ISD, Clinton Township, MI

The 3rd annual Collaborative Tools for Learning Conference, sponsored by the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) and hosted by the Macomb ISD, will show educators how to make use of the next generation of technologies to support student learning and achievement. A host of new tools and practices of Web 2.0 and beyond are focusing on how learners of all ages and abilities can collaborate to explore new ideas and understandings.

This one-day conference will include both hour-long demonstration sessions and 90 minute hands-on sessions to develop skills and provide ideas of how these new tools address student understanding. Proposals are welcomed from all educators who can show how these tools support and enhance student collaboration and learning.

Two full-day preconference workshops will be offered on Thursday, November 12 by SIGPL on:

1. iTeach: Using iPods and iPhones for Teaching and Learning
2. How to Survive (and Thrive) as a Technology Integration Specialist

Online registration will be available at a later date.  Visit http://macul.org/otherevents/collaborativetoolsconference/ for more information.

TEXT TO MOVIE WEB-BASED PROGRAM

Are you looking for a fun way to have your students practice their writing skills?  Check out the free web-based text to movie program called Xtra Normal.  Let’s say students just finished reading about the Revolutionary War and you want them to summarize what they learned.  You can have them type up a script for one or two characters.  Once they have written the script they can use Xtra Normal to create a short video of their summary.  The free version provides students with 6 options of worlds to be the setting and up to 2 characters for each world.

After the student enters the script into the program they can add other types of actions as well such as different camera angles, facial expressions, looks and other movements by the characters, and sounds like applause or laughter.   Soundtracks can also be added to the video.  Students can even choose what type of voice their characters will have.

Once a movie is completed students can share the results by sending the movie URL via email, posting it to their social networking site (Facebook, MySpace) or bookmarking tool (Delicious, Digg),  or embedding it into a webpage.  Unfortunately downloading the movie file is not available with the free version.

There are some things to keep in mind when using this program with students.  First, when using the free version they must make their video public in order for others, such as you the teacher, to view it.  There is a Keep Private check box for each video created but when checked only the person that created it can view the video.  With this in mind, it would be important to limit the type of videos you have your students create to content they have learned in class.  A video of what they did over the summer or anything else containing personal information may not be a good idea to have available to anyone connected to the Internet. In addition, when they register for an account they should not be providing any personal information that would be visible on the Xtra Normal website.  For example when they choose their username they shouldn’t use their first or last name.  Rather something like Aardvark or Student1 would be better.

Second, students may end up spending way more time than necessary adding the different types of actions.  It would be important to have them enter the entire script first before adding any of the extras and then limiting them to only a certain amount of time to create the entire video.  This will help ensure that the main intent of your assignment is completed before all the extraneous items.  This will also provide students with a reward for completing the main work.

Check the commercial of the MAET program that we created using Xtra Normal by visiting our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc3LbAT-QyQ

Greetings Educators,

A few weeks ago my colleague and partner in crime, Matt Koehler and I, published an article in the journal Learning and Leading with Technology, the membership magazine of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).  In this article titled, “Too Cool for School, No Way” (http://tinyurl.com/c6p5ta/), we tried to make the argument that new technologies (such as Facebook, iPhone, Flickr, WordPress, Google Earth, GPS devices, YouTube so on) have the potential to fundamentally change the way we think about teaching and learning.

However, realizing this potential is not an easy task. Merely bringing these tools into the classroom will not lead to change and in fact may be a dangerous distraction. As educators we need to think through how these tools can function with specific pedagogical contexts for teaching specific subject matter. For instance even the same technology needs to be understood and used differently if teaching different subject matter or in a different grade level. For instance, using Google Earth to teach geography (http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth_discovery.html) at the high school level is very different from using it at the elementary level. Moreover, Google Earth does not constrain us to using it just to teach geography.  It can be used fruitfully for teaching mathematics (for instance check out http://www.realworldmath.org), something the original designers of Google Earth clearly did not consider when designing the software program. In the L&L article we have a bunch of other interesting examples that I won’t repeat here. But I do want to make two key points.

First, it is hard to predict what these new tools can do for us. Just as Google Earth could be used to teach mathematics, the educational possibilities of many of these tools is yet to be recognized or identified. A great example I recently came across was a classroom in Italy who used mp3 recordings of the moon landing and an open source audio-editing software program called Audacity to compute the distance to the moon! Who would have thought that Audacity, an audio editing program, could be used as a data analysis tool? You can read more about this fascinating project  at http://tinyurl.com/mqedva/.

Second, the fact that we don’t know which tools could be used for educational purposes makes it really hard to predict what we should teach in our teacher education and professional development programs. Clearly teaching specific technologies is doomed to fail. For those of us who remember the hype about Hypercard or the dreams about Dreamweaver, I wonder what we will think about the twitter about Web 2.0, blogs and wikis a decade from now.

What this means is that our emphasis should be more on developing flexible frameworks that support recognizing the potentials of new technologies and their integration into the teaching of subject matter. This is not a passive approach towards technology integration but rather one that sees teachers as creators of new ways of engaging students with powerful ideas. These are teachers who are designers of learning environments, fluent in their knowledge not just of subject matter, pedagogy and technology but in the way these three things are to work together.

In our master’s program we try to push for such flexible approaches towards educational technology. Through our on-campus, off-campus and online courses we attempt to create a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world that emphasizes these values of life-long learning and creativity, of engagement and play.

As our program is continually evolving and growing, the EduTech Today newsletter is undergoing a few exciting changes. First off, the Director’s column will now be shared between the Director of the Certificate program, Dr. Joseph Codde, and me (the Director of the Master’s program, Dr. Punya Mishra.) Another change to the newsletter is the addition of a few new column categories. We are adding three new categories: MAET News, Job Postings and Grants and other Funding as well as making changes to the Instructor Spotlight. The Alumni Spotlight has been merged with the Instructor Spotlight so we can highlight both our terrific alumni and program faculty.

We are transitioning to a new email service and therefore you may receive two newsletter emails this month. One from our old service and one from our new service, MailChimp. If you do not receive two emails of the same newsletter this month you may want to visit http://newsletter.edutech.msu.edu/subscribe to be sure that you are part of the new email list.

Lastly the number of issues that we will be distributing has changed. With our new format you will be receiving the newsletter bi-monthly (6 issues/year) instead of quarterly (4 issues/year). Many of the new columns that we have added are time-sensitive information that the quarterly format did not accommodate. The bi-monthly format will help you keep up to date with the latest information for job postings, grants and other funding, as well as other great tips and ideas for using technology in the classroom and ways to connect with the MAET program.

So once again thank you for being part of the MAET family. From all of us here at MAET central, all the best as you transition into summer.

Dr. Punya Mishra
Director MAET Program
College of Education
Michigan State University
Web: http://punyamishra.com
Blog: http://punya.educ.msu.edu/blog/

Flatten Your Classroom

A few years ago Thomas Friedman wrote the international bestselling book “The World is Flat”, which examined the effects of globalization on countries, companies, and individuals.  Globalization and the latest in Web 2.0 technologies have also affected education.   A new free e-book titled “Seven Steps to Flattening Your Classroom” is based on an Atomic Learning workshop developed by Vicki Davis, who has been recognized for her innovative use of the Web in the classroom.  The book shares seven steps to transform the classroom through global collaboration.

The seven steps that are covered in the e-book include:

Step 1: Connect Yourself

Step 2: Connect Your Students

Step 3: Create Prolearners

Step 4: Communicate

Step 5: Character

Step 6: Citizenship and Safety

Step 7: Choice and Focus

If you are interested in learning more about flattening your classroom you can also visit the workshops that Vicki Davis has created for Atomic Learning at http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/7sfc_wb2.  Several of the workshops are offered as free samples but most of them are only accessible if you have a subscription to Atomic Learning.

Using Quia in the Classroom

Two of our current Educational Technology students highlighted Quia, a company providing many different web-based tools for educators, in their Sharing Tips and Tricks section of their classes. Charles Kubolz, a Certificate student this past summer, highlighted Quia in the Sharing Tips and Tricks discussion in MACUL Space. To read Charles’ summary please visit the second page of the Sharing Tips and Tricks discussion for the EduTech Group on MACUL Space. (http://maculspace.ning.com/group/msuedutech).

In addition, Rehab Rajab, a MAET Plymouth student, demonstrated how it worked in her class this summer and has provided a brief write up for this newsletter.

I use Quia to create quizzes, games, activities, surveys, class WebPages and online calendars for my classes. I create a class roster at the beginning of the year which automatically creates a user name and a password for each student; those are usually e-mailed to the students or printed off and given to them by the teacher. By creating an account for each student in my class, I can track their work as they log on every time they do one of my activities. Students also like to see their scores which are easily seen when they log into their accounts even from home where they can share it with their parents.

There are sixteen activity templates to choose from when creating a new activity such as Battleship, Cloze, Challenge Board, Concentration, Flashcards and many others. When an activity is created, the teacher has the option to share it with others or keep it private which creates a bank of activities that teachers can search and copy into their accounts.

I use the Quizzes feature the most. Quizzes that are created by Quia can be taken online or printed off. Teachers can choose from 16 types of questions where inserting images and audio files are possible. When a quiz is created, all the questions in this quiz are saved in the teacher’s bank of questions. So the questions are saved even if the quiz is deleted later on. Quizzes can be automatically graded and students see their scores immediately. Open ended questions can be graded by the teacher online. The great thing about this feature is that it keeps the whole process electronic and thus no paper is wasted. The same quiz can be copied for different classes with different passwords, time limits and number of attempts.

I create a customized Webpage for each class where I can post messages, recommend activities and websites, and assign homework with downloadable files for my students. I also use it as an electronic bulletin board where I announce scores and award some students. The calendar option makes it possible to post deadlines and quiz dates online as well. It helps the students become independent by following up what’s happening on the class webpage themselves.

Quia saved me a lot of time and effort.

-Rehab Rajab, MSU MAET Plymouth Student