Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School's Media Productions Class
Archive for November, 2011
Congrats to Our NATIONAL Award Winners!
Nov 22nd
Congratulations go out to Kailee, Kaelee, Mandy, and Chase for taking 2nd place in the Student Television Network Challenge held recently! They were given the prompt of “A View from the Inside” and had to create a video telling a story that matched. Here’s the winning video they created:
We also want to recognize our other STN Challenge team made up of Kasey, Laura, Danica, and Sharae for doing a great job on their video. It didn’t win any awards this year with the judges but as you can see they did a very good job on it as well!
Mahalo Uncle Toyo! The iPads are IN!!!
Nov 21st
Our brand new 64 GB iPad 2s are finally in the hands of our students. It took me a little while to figure out how best to configure them but I think I finally found a solution last week. The cases also just arrived last week so I hurriedly spent Wednesday and Thursday updating them and getting them ready to go for our parent meeting on Friday night. I was in school until 11:30 pm on Thursday night to finish in time!
I had to speak with several people for their advice and read up on a lot of articles on the Internet to figure out the best way to handle the deployment of these 20 iPads to my advanced media students. I decided to create one main CKTV Media iTunes account and then sync all of the iPads to that one account. I thought about creating a new iTunes account for each of the iPads but then I would have had to purchase 20 separate copies of all of the apps that I bought and downloaded onto them. I’m sure Apple wouldn’t recommend this as the way to do it, but purchasing apps right now from the iTunes Store is a mess if you are an educational customer. The Hawaii DOE has all of these restrictions on how to handle iTunes gift cards and they only recently created a way to do it. I didn’t have the time to wait for that to sort itself out so I went with the best way that I could at the moment. I’d like to have a paid app or license for each iPad but that’s going to have a wait a little until we can sort this stuff out.
I was able to create a nice set of apps for the students to use in the meantime. Here are the apps I decided to start off with:
- Pages, Keynote, and Garageband for word processing, Powerpoint type presentations, and music creation from Apple.
- Evernote for note taking
- Dropbox for cloud storage
- Google Translate for when we take our trip to Japan next year
- Idea Flight for sharing presentations with one another
- Noterize (also called Passport Notes) to mark up PDF files
- SimpleMind to do mind mapping
- Notability for note taking using a stylus
- Merriam Webster dictionary for obvious reasons
- Web MD in case they need to save my life
- Google and Google Earth to search and lookup addresses or sites
- Gmail to check their email
- The Weather Channel for updates on the weather
- Amazon’s Kindle if they need to read an ebook
- PhotoSync to transfer photos
- Pulse, CNN, NPR, and ABC for news
- Dragon Dictation to see if it could help with our trascribing of interviews
- eClicker to use to provide feedback for our videos or to take a quiz
- iMovie for editing videos
- Starwalk to learn about our constellations
- iheartradio to listen to Internet radio stations
It’s a pretty ambitious list so far and there’s more that I want to add. We’ll make sure we can all use these correctly first before we add more however.
I have to mention how incredibly excited my students were to receive them last week. They each had smiles on their faces a mile long and even today, a few days later, they are still on such an incredible high. As a teacher, I can’t tell you how excited this makes me feel, to be able to use a tool like this to engage my students. It’s definitely going to challenge me to stay on top of this to find new ways to use the iPads effectively in our classroom. These will not be used as expensive electronic toys. They are going to change the way we do things in our class for the better and I can’t thank Uncle Toyo and his Ohana enough for this incredible gift. We are truly blessed to have the support of Uncle Toyo and his Family who believe in our students. They have been extremely generous from their first donation of iMacs and Macbook Pros a few years ago and this has been another blessing. We will make good use of these tools, I promise you!
Mahalo Uncle Toyo and the Murayama Ohana!
Journal Topics for This Week
Nov 21st
Kupono is the topic for your Hawaiian Value constructed response journal for this week. Out of your other two journals, one needs to be a thank you to Uncle Toyo for the iPads and the other is of your choice.
In your thank you, be sure to explain how you felt when you found out you were getting this incredible educational tool to use and how you have already used it and intend to use it in our class.
Remember that all three journals need to be posted by Sunday at midnight to receive full credit. Some of you forgot to complete your three from last week and your postings don’t lie….they say EXACTLY when you posted it so don’t delay. Now that you have your shiny new iPads YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE!!!
Journal/Blog Entries
Nov 15th
Now that everyone has been set up on the Edublog site, we are now going to be moving all of our constructed response and reflective journals to the web as posts on your site. Here is your new assignment. Each week you are required to post THREE new posts to your blog. One must be in the constructed response format and it will usually involve our Hawaiian values that we’ve been doing. The other two will be more reflective. I want you to write about things that are going on in our class. What am I talking about? Here are some suggestions:
- With the iPads coming soon, what do you look forward to using on it the most?
- How will you use the iPad in our class?
- What new app did you find out about that you think would help our class that you want to share?
- How are your projects coming along?
- What has been the most difficult part of your project and how did you work through it?
- What are your ideas for future projects?
- What new thing have you learned?
- How can we improve our morning announcements?
- Do you have a new idea on how we can be more efficient in class?
- How can we improve our radio broadcasts?
As you can see, the possibilities are endless. You can pretty much write those other two posts about anything going on IN OUR CLASS. I don’t want you to write about silly things like what happened on Glee last night or what you think of the new Justin Bieber “Mistletoe” song. Keep those conversations to yourself! I want educational stuff here on your blog.
Now until we get the iPads configured, you’ll have to log in to your blog site via our computers in school or at home. I don’t care where you do it, as long as they get done. Remember, you need to do 3 a week with 1 being a constructive response journal and the other 2 being reflective journals about something going on in class. In order to keep the iPad, you’ll have to show that it’s being used effectively in class. If you can’t prove that you’re using it to be more efficient in class or that you’re using it in an educational way, it’s going to have to be returned to me. Your blog is a great place to prove this…so what are you waiting for????
Another Cool Video
Nov 3rd
