So I’ve had a Mac for almost three years and I had never tried iWeb. Recently, I have had a reason to.
Now I’ve used Serif, a PC based web site creator, and found success in using it with Moodle. But my home Dell laptop is getting on in years and the processing is… s…l…o…w… It’s good for older games like Knights of the Old Republic but I digress…
So I took the challenge and started making some webpages with iWeb. iLike!
There are some really great features. They create templates that you can drag and drop your content into. The are some drawbacks. They create templates that you can drag and drop your content into. You can customize them but it takes a little know-how and some things like navigation can’t be modified.
I’ve been trying a few web page creators for my Moodle course. The first one I tried was Serif Web Plus x4. Our school division has purchase a site license and it is available on all divisional machines.
There are two excellent reasons to use Serif Web Plus x4. The first is that through the divisional site license all teachers can have a copy for home use for free. I simply asked for my copy and installed it on my home PC.
The second reason is that the help menu and help videos launch with the program. So for newbies like me who are experimenting for the first time with web publishing, I was able to find answers quickly to roadblocks.
Here is an example:
The division will be upgrading to Serif Web Plus x5 into fall. I look forward to using it.
So I tried Voki. I found it to be easy to navigate and I was able to create a realistic avatar. Although you can create some pretty crazy ones too, it is not appropriate for my Moodle class! I was successful in embedding the code in Moodle by adding an HTML block. When I checked it in IE and Firefox it worked but for some reason it doesn’t like Safari. Hmmm. I’m stumped. I’ll see if I can get it to work here so you can see it. But it is unreliable to add to Moodle. Boo.
I needed to write a narrative story and I have heard that you should write about something that you know. Hmmm… what do I know well?
Then it came to me as a flash of lightning. In my Moodle course I have a page waiting to be filled called About the Instructor. I thought that this could be a way to introduce myself to my students and add another feature to my course.
I decided that I would write about myself. I do know the subject matter well. At least I hope I do.
The next step was to decide on a Web 2.0 tool. I had heard about Animoto from a colleague so I wanted to check it out. I created an account and started to explore.
Animoto wanted only pictures and text. Oh! O.k., I’ll go with it. I can use picture with text but not together. O.k. I’ll go with it. Let’s start adding some text and some pictures from my computer. Wow! Animoto has music included that is not Photo Story synthesizer. Love it!
FAIL! Pretty good but not to the standard I wanted.
I needed to go back to the storyboard. What did I want to include? What did I want to highlight? How could I create pictures so that the University logos to show up in Animoto?
So I brainstormed a few more things that I am. Selected a few more photos from my computer and looked for a few that weren’t. (Ug. I didn’t realize how many photos I have in iPhoto.) I created jpegs for the University logos in PowerPoint.
Upload, type, rearrange, delete, upload, type, rearrange and repeat. Here is my second attempt.
It was not a whale. But there was still a tweak I needed to do. What happened to my team photo?
I never did figure out what happened. But I added another photo and it worked. No idea how that worked but I did have success. Here is my final video.
This is an awesome program. The students that I am developing the course for are grade 11 Students. They are above Animoto’s magic age of thirteen. I wouldn’t be able to ask the students to create an account (Divisional Policy) but they could if they so choose.
For those students who are under the age of thirteen, we could use teacher accounts. I wonder how many students you can have log in simultaneously? Bandwidth considerations? Will I take down an elementary school with too many students at one time? Add these to the questions to ask when I get back to work in the fall.
This tool was very intuitive and easy to learn. I think students would be highly motivated to use it because it was easy. The tough part will be to teach them how to use it effectively. But that is what I am there to do. Introduce the tool and teach them how to tell a story.
I enjoyed working on the wiki this week. I always enjoy collaboratively working with colleagues. This is not the first time that I have worked with a wiki but the first time with this class.
I had no major challenges with following the wiki. I forgot that there was a watch feature. Ooops. When items were changed they would be bold and in the list of recent changes. That would have made the week go by easier instead of trying to figure it out.
My own personal preference is to have fewer students to collaborate in a wiki. I like to colour code the person’s writing. It is a personal learning style preference and easier for me to follow. However, I soldiered on.
There are some challenges of working with other in a collaborative working space. With students you do have to talk about the etiquette for working on a wiki. For our group, we weren’t given any formal guidelines, we just did it but people were giving permission to modify their work as we went.
There are many advantages I see in using wikis for group collaboration. Teachers as a simple step can use wikis on a professional level to create agendas for meetings, lists for math manipulatives, a book study, and all the administrivia that we are asked to do together. This way they can collaborate asynchronously. They usually do not have prep times together and arranging a meeting time in person can be too late. The advantages for students… extend their learning beyond the day and the four walls of the classroom. The can share, show, demonstrate and collaborate on anything.
Interesting! I have not used Word Press before and my first impression is that it is pretty intuitive. There is a lot more here to discover than I originally thought… Let the fun and play begin!
