Digital Dewey

Learning CAN be fun!

We want children to be engaged, enjoy what they are doing and be learning at the same time.

With my blog down for maintenance over the weekend, I decided to explore a few more media tools, and found a couple of ways to get the kids laughing AND learning.

‘Blabberize’.

Blabberize is free and easy to use.

1. Upload your photo. You need to choose a photo where the mouth is large enough to be seen clearly. Crop if necessary.
2. Position and shape a mouth onto the mouth of the photo you uploaded.  This is the part that will move when the mouth opens and closes with the voice you record later on.
3. Record your own voice or add a sound file you have already made.
4. Convert to a video or just grab the HTML code.
5. Sit back and have a good laugh.

Too much fun to be educational, you say?

Because it was my first attempt, I just experimented and had fun with it, but how could you use Blabberize in the classroom?

Here are a few suggestions for classroom use:

An endangered animal making a plea for help; sing a rap about something you’ve done; advertise a product you have developed; explain how something works; Blabberize a cartoon; or for LOTE, speak in a foreign language; read a poem; present a short argument or a deliver a speech; be a person in history and talk about what you did; Blabberize your blog with information about it; draw your own picture; write a script for the image and read it aloud; make a book character come alive; present a maths problem for students to solve.

Fotobabble.

Fotobabble is similar to Blabberize but without the talking mouth. Although this was very simple, the on-line recording was a bit limiting.

All you have to do is -

1. Upload a photo.
2. Record a message online.
3. Save and embed Fotobabble or share.

Suggested Classroom Uses:

• Sing a jingle.
• Present a point of view.
• Describe what’s happening in the photo.
• Make up a story about the photo.
• Use a news photos and report on the news.
• Review a book.

I’m sure there are lots of applications in the classroom for both Blabberize and Fotobabble.

Please post your ideas on a sticky note on this Wallwisher.

You can also see what other people have added.  Click on the image link below.

Hidden benefits –

• Learning how to record a sound file. (plus uploading it in Blabberize)
• Emphasis on using expression and speaking clearly when recording.
• Keeping the text brief but informative.

You could be only one click away from the perfect picture too. Everyone has a digital camera or phone these days.

So get out your camera . . aim . . . click . . . and then surprise yourself with how creative you can be (and how much fun you can have).

This heart-shaped word mosaic was created on Image Chef. Here you can add text to a sketch pad, create a poetry poster, make word mosaics, use an assortment of frames, or remix from user made examples.

Let’s look at some ways you can add fun to your day and artistic pictures to your repertoire.

5 Image Story

Here’s my 5 image story. Well, it’s actually a sentence that represents a big part of my life.  Each picture represents one word of the sentence. Can you read my sentence?

To get these effects, I used 2 programs, Be Funky and Fotoflexer. Both programs are easy to use and give you lots of options.

BeFunky lets you apply photo effects, enhance and edit your photos online. Effects include cartoon, sketch, painting, pop art and lots more…

Fotoflexer lets you add effects, fonts, shapes, doodling, distortions, layers, and best of all RE-TOUCH! Re-touch allows you to easily fix blemishes and wrinkles, so anyone can look 21 in all their photos again. (What I’ve been waiting for!)

I also used Fotoflexer to make this collage to see at a glance what amazing effects can be applied to one image.

Another program which allows you to create collages of your photos is
Shape Collage. It’s free but you need to download the program to your computer. Use your own images or photos from the web. You can make your photos appear in the shape of a rectangle, heart, circle, letters, or even draw your own shapes. This is also a quick and easy tool to use.

Make a Movie from your Photos

It’s great to find things that are quick and easy but give good results. I use animoto a lot and the students absolutely love it. We now use animoto for education which allows you to make longer movies and students can have their own accounts which you can view from your emails.

Here’s how we combined Wordle and images in an animoto video.

Playing with images is fun, but there are many applications for the classroom which I will be exploring further. Meanwhile I’m off to play some more . . .

The Edublog Teacher Challenge Activity 5 – “Images – the eyes of the blog” has some great suggestions and advice on how to find and use images in your blog in both the Beginner and Advanced posts.

Photo attributions for 5 Image Story

Original image: ‘oil slick eye’ licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.0Generic http://www.flickr.com/photos/27021814@N00/22613927

Original image: ‘under my umbrella’ licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic http://www.flickr.com/photos/36613169@N00/1828177743

Original image: ‘let peace’ licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic http://www.flickr.com/photos/37309069@N04/3822829488

Original image: ‘reading time’ licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic  http://www.flickr.com/photos/12692384@N00/255230682

Original image: ‘what I’m reading and re-reading’ licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic   http://www.flickr.com/photos/61787893@N00/163867388