Bits and Bytes

Posts Tagged ‘ICT’

Please sign up for two break out sessions for the afternoon of November 5, 2012. This can be accomplished at…

LwICT Session link on the Bits & Bytes Blog. Registration in each session is limited, so sign up sooner rather than later.

There are five exciting sessions being offered…

Scratch:

Scratch is a programming language designed to be used by a variety of ages!  Scratch is on the WSD Image; it is a free software developed @ MIT that uses snap together blocks to create animations, programs, simulations and more. In this session, get acquainted with the basic parts and functions in Scratch. Work with a buddy to create a program.  See some WSD student work samples created with Scratch, and hear about a teacher’s Scratch journey.

Gaming in Education:

Attendees of this session may or may not have access to video games for use in their classroom. We will discuss and use examples of games that could be used in classroom as texts, and why these games are valuable differentiators of – but not replacements of – traditional curricula. Further, we will discuss ways that teachers can model their practice using educational designs embedded within video games if games themselves are not a possibility for classroom instruction.

Teachers Like Free Stuff:

This workshop will focus on the development of free online education resources for 21st century educators.  The workshop will explore free screencasts, screen annotations, free online apps, QR codes and the Partners in Learning Resources.

iBook Author:

iBooks Author is an amazing app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, mathematical expressions, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could. The session will be an introduction to creating multimedia books using iBook Author.

Video Green Screening with iMovie:

This session will look at green screening in video using iMovie & iPads. Lighting and green screening equipment will be highlighted. Participants will be lead through the process of setting up and successfully filming against a green screen. Then the fun will begin as participants will learn to composite their green screen video with other video or stills!

Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is as realistic as possible.

Advantages of Artweaver

• Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, pencils…
• Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools.
• Transparency and Layers support.
• Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic.
• Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD.
• Pen Tablet support
• Support for many languages
• Artweaver is Freeware.
• And much more…

International Futures (IFs) is a large-scale, long-term, integrated global modeling system. It represents demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, socio-political, and environmental subsystems for 183 countries interacting in the global system. The central purpose of IFs is to facilitate exploration of global futures through alternative scenarios. The model is integrated with a large database containing values for its many foundational data series since 1960. Through this web site IFs is freely available to users both on-line and in downloadable form.

http://www.ifs.du.edu/

SAM Animation is software designed to allow students to create stop-action animations to share their ideas and understanding. The application provides a unique experience for students to show their understanding of projects in mathematics, science, english languge arts, social studies and more. Best of all it’s free!

Platforms – Windows and Mac

http://www.samanimation.com/

Shape Collage creates a collage by taking a collection of photos and arranging them so that they form a shape (defined by an image or the text you enter). When arranging the photos, they will be spread apart as far as possible so that one can see each photo.

Download (329 kb)

I used WSD as the template for the collage, click on the thumbnail to see the complete image.

Plagiarism in Cyberspace:Learning the Rules of Recycling Content with a View Towards Nurturing Academic Trust in an Electronic World

LSS Pathfinder: Challenging Plagiarism This is a listing of LSS resources including a DVD  which is available for loan Ethics: Cheating and Plagiarism which talks with students and teachers about cheating and plagiarism and gives some suggestions for working with students.

Writing History: A Video Discussion about Plagiarism between several history professors

Plagiarism in Medical Studies reported in the Winnipeg Free Press March 6, 2009

Plagiarism Scandal news story about  an author, a student from Harvard, whose book contained over 40 similarities to another author’s work.

An Educator’s Guide to Post-Modern Authorship and Literacy in the Classroom
“Blog Post Summary: Teachers hold a unique and powerful position in the debate about what constitutes authorship and plagiarism. These debates are important because they shape the future of scholarship and art. When a teacher sets an intellectual boundary for what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable work, they are molding the intellectual processes of students. Educators must help students understand the rights and responsibilities of authorship while allowing for innovative acts of assemblage.”

This simple video shows how easy it is to copy scripts from one sprite to another in Scratch.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Download with player | Download PDF (Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 required)

Photoscape is a very powerful, relatively easy to use application which offers many interesting options. It’s a combination photo editor, collage creator, image splitter, the list goes on, and on…  The interface can be a little daunting (features, features, features), but once you get use to it I doubt you’ll want to give it up, it’s absolutely phenomenal – and it’s FREE (no nag screens, no placed advertisements)!

Key Features

• Viewer: View your folders photos, slide show
• Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, back light correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming
• Batch editor: Batch editing multiple photos
• Page: Make one photo by merging multiple photos at the page frame
• Combine: Make one photo by attaching multiple photos vertically or horizontally
• Animated GIF: Make one animation photo with multiple photos
• Print: Print portrait shot, carte de visite, passport photo
• Splitter: Divide a photo into multiple parts
• Screen Capture: Capture your screen shot and save it
• Color Picker: Zoom in screen on images, search and pick the color
• Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode
• Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG

Download (from WSD) – New version 3.3

Alice Links:

• Main Site – www.alice.org
  • About Alice
• Download Alice Version 2.2 with Alice textbook worlds- from WSD
  • Windows with Learning to Program (185MB)
  • Mac with Learning to Program (162MB)

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.

In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

Alice Demonstration

http://blogs.wsd1.org/etr/files/alicedemonstrationvideo.flv

Storytelling Alice Links:

• Main Site – http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/
  • Research on Stoytelling Alice
• Download Storytelling Alice – from WSD
  • Download StorytellingAlice.zip (122 MB)
  • Storytelling Alice Guide

In contrast to the large number of people who use computers and computer programs in their daily lives, relatively few learn to create their own computer programs. Storytelling Alice is a programming environment designed to motivate a broad spectrum of middle school students (particularly girls) to learn to program computers through creating short 3D animated movies.

To enable and encourage users to create animated stories, Storytelling Alice includes:

1. High-level animations that enable users to program social interactions between characters.
2. A story-based tutorial that introduces users to programming through building a story.
3. A gallery of 3D characters and scenery with custom animations designed to spark story ideas.

Storytelling Alice provides a motivating context in which to learn programming. A study comparing middle school girls’ experiences with learning to program in Storytelling Alice and in a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice) showed that:

• Users of Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming than users of Generic Alice.
• Users of Storytelling Alice were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time to program).
• Despite the focus on making programming more fun, users of Storytelling Alice were just as successful at learning basic programming concepts as users of Generic Alice.