Video: Lights, Camera, Action!

My 3.5 year old son is hooked onto podcasts now! There are so many free podcasts that I do not know why one would need to buy audio CDs anymore. My son and I have enjoyed podcasts this week from:

 
Storytime Home
Storynory 
BBC Time to Move music

Pinky Dinky Doo

From an educational standpoint, podcasts are excellent resources for any teacher. My husband is the music teacher at our school and I cannot wait to share the vast audio story/music podcasts available for him to subscribe to. As a teacher-librarian, it is an addition resource for students to hear great storytelling from others. I am finding that many students do not know how to read expressly, confidently, and fluently. Having students listen to quality story time podcasts would help them learn what good reading should sounds like...not "robot reading."

I have sound recorder on my PC so I recorded my son's first singing "podcast" of Twinkle Twinkle. It took me awhile to figure out how to embed a mp3 file onto blogger. First, I needed to convert my wma (Windows Media) file to a mp3 file via a music converter online. I'd wish I paid more attention to my husband when he uploaded mp3 music/band files for students on to his blog! Next, most people online recommended www.divshare.com. It was the easiest way to share my files onto blogger. This free/paid site allows you to share all media files. I don't understand why blogger does not have a mp3 uploader. There is already one for images and video. Go figure! Here is my son's first Canadian Idol performance:

Now for the video portion...I have made several videos using Windows Movie Maker before.Yet, it was good to play with it and refresh my memory again. Ultimately, I would like to make a book trailer that is like a movie trailer with the trailer voice and all. Anyone have any good ideas on how to make a great book trailer? The fun parts of playing with a movie maker is adding titles, captions, and credits. Also, being able to trim, edit, add visual effects, and much more is pretty cool! If you have 2 minutes and 40 secs to spare from your busy life then go ahead and watch a snippet of our family trip to Fairhaven, Washington from our summer. I apologize for the short shaky camera part. My hubby was walking and filming at the same time. Another disappointment is that in order to share your YouTube video on blogger you need to make it public. Oh well! Enjoy!

Flickr and Picasa

I had a Flickr account a long time ago. Like many other online tools, I did not use Flickr to its full potential. Occasionally, I would share photos with family members. To confess, I did not sign up for Flickr until my brother shared some old family photos with me. He wanted me to turn his photos into a photobook for him and Flickr was the easiest way to share his photos without emailing huge jpg files. Unlike many of my peers, who have uploaded and organized their family photos nicely into Facebook, Flickr or Picasa, our family photos are still backed up in our portable hard drive. Why? Initially, my husband and I did not feel "safe" to publicly share photos of our children online. I realize now that Flickr enables me to set parameters of who are able to view my photos.

After reading chapter 7, Richardson provided me with many interesting insights in using Flickr more effectively. Humorously, my colleague revealed to me that her IT brother-in-law was exasperated with her because she told him that all she uses her smartphone for is to text and make phone calls! He replied annoyingly, "It is like having a trunk in a car and not knowing how to use it!" Richardson showed me that I can now access the "trunk" of Flickr's features. Learning how to use the annotation feature came at a perfect time! For my Back to School September bulletin board I had a library contest where students in the entire school had to guess the silhouettes of each different book character. It was a hit! Many of the students wanted to find out who the different characters were and it attracted them into the library. The prize was a free book of their choice under $25. Originally, I just posted the photo onto my library website blog; however, the photo is now enhanced with Flickr notes of the characters and a link to author websites.

Click on photo to see annotations in Flickr

Like Ben, I was very frustrated with Blogger because it does not support special html to directly view the annotated photo on the blog. I tried for over 2 hours with different html code converters to get the right code. Sheepishly, I found out from Aaron that Blogger does not support special html. Sigh!

Here is my magazine photo for my Fall bulletin board. I have used BigHugeLabs before and previous Grade 5 students have enjoyed making Canadian geography magazine covers.

 

Another problem with Flickr was that when I uploaded my BigHugeLab magazine cover to Flickr, I could not share it even if it was set on public. I had to save it to my desktop to paste it into Blogger. Hmm? I have subscribed to some of my friend's Flickr accounts and viewed wonderful pictures they have taken and commented on them. Flickr is a great platform for photo sharing because there are some amazing photos out there taken by amateur and professional photographers. I am intrigued to find out if Picasa will be more user friendly. 

 

First off, Picasa seems to be more user friendly because of its link to Google products like Blogger and Google+. Since this is a Google Blog, uploading photos were a little simpler. Picasa uploaded my 22 photos just a bit faster than Flickr. Also, Picasa offered more than one printing service and the movie maker was definitely easier to use when I downloaded the Picasa desktop. Oddly, it looked like Flickr wanted me to upload all my photos again in order to make a movie and it only provides a 90 sec movie. Here is my Picasa movie of my Noodle Boy!

 

Autobiography of a Tech User/Creator

Circa 1984. That was the year my life changed. Alright, it didn't completely change my life but that was that year where technology entered my life. Yes, the processing power of our new "computer" was only 8 bit. However, it provided hours and hours of fun with my two brothers! The game was Duck Hunt.

I was fascinated with this game because it was the first time where I could interact with what was shown on a "TV" screen. The sense of power and control was nothing I had ever experienced before. In true autobiographical form, I became a video game addict! Justifying my addiction, Joseph Kerr writes in Kist's book that, "Kids expect to interact with their media. While they have not abandoned television completely, they are savvy prosumers who want to take part" (Kist, 113). Over the years, I moved from console to console playing many different and wonderful games. However, it took awhile to acquire our first family computer. Having poor immigrant parents who struggled to make ends meet, we finally received an IBM PC DOS. Later when Microsoft took over, that was when computers became essential to me. Typing up assignments in Word meant I did not have to write them. Almost all my peers were handing in their Dot Matrix papers. 

The realization of the shift from the written word to computer printed words in my life and society in general was profound. Interesting, just last week my husband and I were discussing about receiving written carbon copies of report cards. Happily, we were both thankful that we never had to hand-write reports because of computers!  

My bros and I at Peace Arch.

Unfortunately, I could not locate the photo where my younger brothers and I were playing video games. One brother is only a year younger and the other one is six years younger. Their expertise in computers definitely made me want to be just as knowledgeable. The brother in the middle of the picture works at BCIT in the IT department and the younger one works at TD bank. They are both computer geeks. When I designed my school library website. I constantly asked for their feedback and know-how. I believe it was my brothers who first introduced me to hotmail (Internet). Instead of asking for phone numbers of new friends I made, I would ask for their email addresses. 

Circa 1999, I suspect that was the year when the Internet changed my life! In the beginning, the main purpose of using the Internet was to check emails. Albeit, I still check my emails everyday but my emails come to me via my smartphone now. I wonder if smartphones will eventually phase out laptop computers?! Recently, we cancelled cable because we just did not have the time to watch TV and we signed up for Netflix instead. Here is a list of some of the things I use the Internet for:

• watch movies, TV show, Youtube, etc. 
• comparison shopping
• shop online for books, clothes, apps, etc. (ebay, craigslist, amazon, altrec, apple store)
• book travel (priceline, kayak, vrbo, allegiant, travel deals for vancouverites, etc) booked a trip for March to Hawaii. (Tip: When booking a car reserve with Dollar.com, they do not require a credit card reservation so no cancellation fees or no refunds like priceline. Closer to your travel date, check priceline and make a bid for a car and see if you get a good price. You can also go back to Dollar.com and cancel and re-reserve if a lower price shows up.)
• banking
• blogging
• making movies of my kids
• publishing (Animoto, Glogster, Prezi, etc.)
• photo sharing (Smilebox, Picasa, photobook)
• document sharing (Google docs)
• cloud storage (dropbox, google)
• bookmarking (delicious)
• planning parties (evite, ecards, perfectpotluck,)
• social networking (Linked In, Twitter)
• gaming (I love Angry Birds)
• recipes
• charity donation (JDRF Canada, World Vision, etc.)
• lesson planning
• reading (Kobo)
• Skype, google hangout 
• all things pertaining to library (snappages, zohosheets, etc.)
• best of all...found my brother-in-law his wife via eHarmony

This list will continue to grow as I continue to explore the vast world of the World Wide Web.

Thinking about the future on Gabriola Island...

Author Richardson reminded that British "Berners-Lee's dream came to fruition in 1993, with the development of the Mosaic Web browser...and as access spread, connections became faster, and more and more Web designers and authors set up shop, the twentieth century ended with the Internet taking its place as an essential communication and research network connecting people around the globe" (Richardson, 1). Incredibly, his statement verifies that it was in my life-time when the Internet took off and became a significant part in my and life and job. 

Lastly, here is a video clip of my children's future and how technology might play into their lives. One of the reasons why I choose to leave Kindergarten and work in the library is because as my children age I need to be up-to-date in technology in order to help them with research and Internet skills. Even if most teenagers believe their parents do not know "anything" about technology I would like to prove my kids wrong! 

Introductory Blog:

K. Kwong
Teacher-Librarian @ Vancouver Christian School

This is my 5th course towards my teacher-librarian diploma. I have a very supportive principal who is encouraging me to finish these courses. It is hard juggling between family, work, UBC, and housework! However, many of you are in the same boat so I am not alone.

I choose blogger because it is user friendly and my school account is linked to gmail so it is easy to keep track of all the google docs, emails, blogs, etc. in one area. Also, for student safety if teachers are using blogger as a homework site, you can eliminate the navigation bar at the top so students cannot click on "next blog" just in case an inappropriate blog shows up!

Evaluation criteria: Hmm, there are many of the Web 2.0 that I know how to use already and some that I haven't explored. One of the best ways to learn is to teach each other. Some of the tools that I haven't had the chance to explore yet: Voicethread (signed up but didn't play with it yet), podcasting, webcasting?, epals, posting to Youtube (camera shy). I deleted my Facebook account because it took way too much time away from my family. However, I might set up a school library facebook page? What do you think?