Today was the first day of our Eduational Technology Inquiry class presentations.

Keiro presented her inquiry into Stop Motion Animation

  • She played  a video showing a simple class project where students moved post-its around on the floor to create a video. It looked like the kids were having a lot of fun, taking turns, moving their bodies
  • For her project, she had problems with one program (iStopMotion?), but used the Stop-Motion app to take all of her photos with a tripod and a special phone grip
  • She put the animation together in photoshop to add drawing
  • The “twinning” button helps make the motion smoother
  • The pros for using this in the classroom are that you could use it for every subject (We are going to integrate it with our art lesson plan I think)
    • One idea she suggested was taking photos in gym class and getting the kids moving around a lot take motion photos
  • The cons she discussed were that you can be really limited by technology sometimes, and it is quite time consuming
  • Her tips are to use a remote camera button
  • And check out giphy.com for awesome gifs!

Katrina, Brie and Taylor presented their inquiry into Digital Literacy. This include:

  • Information literacy – what is fake vs authentic, who is benefitting from information and what bias is there
  • Ethical use – copyright issues
  • Protecting yourself online
  • Digital footprint
  • Handling digital communication
  • Cyber bullying
  • Some interesting resources they covered are:
  • Best practices are:
    • Student choice & voice
    • More creation than consumption
    • Multi-modalities
    • Collaboration – learn and make mistakes with your peers
    • Ensure accessibility for all learners
    • Crowd-accelerated learning
    • Social media & peer-to-peer social learning
    • Focus on core competencies
  • Talk to parents
    • Don’t assume understanding and awareness – parents may not be aware of their child’s online use and footprint
    • Different families have different rules
    • This is part of the B.C. curriculum
    • Communication is key, with a cool idea about a digital family night in class or for the whole school
    • Balance the risks and benefits – validate parents’ concerns, provide reassuring info
  • Address sex ed in digital literacy
    • Kids are learning about sex online, which is both good and bad
    • There is misinformation but also can be more inclusive for people who’s questions are not answered by information about heterosexual relationships
    • Websites don’t replace good quality in class info, so it’s not a way to cop out.
  • And a revisit of the House Hippo!

And we presented our inquiry into Google Geographic Products. The slides  for our presentation are here: Ed Tech Maps

And you can find more information here:

Google Maps Basics

Google My Maps

Google Street View

Cool things to do on Google Earth

Google Sky, Mars, and Moon

Google Earth vs Google Maps

Also check out this post about StoryMap JS. You can use this in somewhat similar ways to My Maps, but it’s a different user interface and slightly different functionality and look.