Have fun with "Audacity"

I found a great little application that allows you to digitally record and edit audio. Audacity is free, open source software that will run on multiple platforms. Audacity is quite powerful and allows you record, edit (cut, paste, duplicate) multiple tracks, thus you can mix music, voice etc.. Other features included are:

• Importing and exporting of different format (WAV, MP3)
• Multi-track mixing
• Digital effects and effect plug-ins.
• Noise removal
• And many other neat features that will allow the creative mind some flexibility.

As a recorder and editor you will be able to produce simple audio files to attach to your presentations (Photostory, Moviemaker, Corel presentations etc…). Use it to create your Podcast or using the multi tracks create a unique sound recording.

Wikis in the Classroom

If you know what a Wiki is and you know how it works, the next question will be; How do I use it in my in the classroom?

Depending on your comfort level you might explore different projects from:

• Basic presentations, where you can post conventional presentations such as PowerPoint
• Data Collection: Create a table and collect data from your class (favourite pet, foods, music etc...
• As the Wiki's moderator you will be able to track group work
• Creating Basic Websites: Consider Wikipedia, which by itself is a series of individual web pages, authored, edited by several contributors.
• Collaborative group work: Where students will create a document, add and edit to the work

To learn more about Wikis in the classroom, listen to a Podcast with Steve Hargadon (EdNet), Adam Frey,Co-Founder of Wikispaces and Vicky Davis, teacher at Westwood Schools : Hargadon Podcast on Wikis in Education

Vicky also presented at the "K12 Online Conference 2007" and you can view her online presentation. Her slideshow is also available and it's titled Wikis in the Classroom .

Wikis

The broader definition of a Wiki is: a site that allows multiple users to collaborate by adding, editing and sharing information to build knowledge. Wiki web sites are easy to use, but hard to describe, but here is a wonderful clip that explains how they evolve.

Wikis in plain English on YouTube

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Or on Blip.TV

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TeacherTube.com

Now imagine what collaborative group work could be achieved in the classroom!

Welcome to my Blog

Blogs have been around for quite some time and are a great platform to share with others.

For more info see Wikipedia.

The IT Academic Elementary Blog was created to assist elementary teachers in their quest for knowledge in the use and integration of technology in their classrooms. In an effort to help teachers and their students, regular "hints", thoughts, etc... in the use of technology will be posted.

If you have any thoughts that you would like to share please do so...

A View to IrfanView

If you look around you, it appears that everyone is taking pictures. Capturing images is very easy and you can use all kinds of devices, from the high end digital camera, your cell phone, to the KIDIZOOM camera (winner of the 2008 Canadian Toy Testing Council /Energizer Battery-Operated Toy of the Year).
But now that you have all of these pictures, what do you do with them?

• You could store them on some sort of media (CD, DVD, hard drive, Media cards etc…)
• You could print them.
• And in this era of social sharing you will probably want to share some of these with family and friends.

But before you share these you will probably want to modify them, resize/resample, crop, do some red eye corrections, add some effects like changing the colours, converting to black and white or sepia, maybe even flip them or rotate them.
To do this you could use a variety of different software but for ease of use and a LOW cost solution, I would recommend IrfanView

IrfanView (pronounce "EarfanView") is a freeware image viewer that was written by Irfan Skiljan from Jajce, Bosnia. The application is small and does all of the above modifications as well as other neat effects.
So before you post your large files, why not create thumbnails or even resize them to a more Web friendly format?

IrfanView is free and there are several wonderful online and downloadable tutorials (Google it)that will help you in you quest to become the next Yousuf Karsh!