My Favorite Freeware!

Over the next few weeks I will show you some of my favorite freeware. As you may know i like to pay nothing for my software. Often I am surprised with the amount and quality of Freeware out there.

My first set of freeware are audio related programs.

1) Audacity. Many people have heard of and been using audacity for a long time. It is worth a mention because of its flexibility and ease of use.

Audacity is basically a audio recording program but it does much more. You can use its effects to do some great tricks to your recording or audio that you have.

Audacity is great if you are a pod caster or are in to movie making. It can export to both Wav and MP3 which is a very handy trick. If you are doing the dreaded School Production and need to cut out that extra chorus or unwanted verse Audacity is great. Just zoom in to where you want to cut and simply highlight and delete.



2) Kristal: Kristal is not so well known but is a great bit of software. It is a step up from Audacity. It is more of a Music creator than a recorder. For you Mac people is similar to Garage Band but no where as good.

Basically you are able to record multiple stands of audio. You could have a drum strand, guitar strand, vocal... You can copy and paste parts or repeat bits as you need. It also have an Equalizer and effects so you can do all sorts of things to each strand (audio) this allowing you to balance everything so it will sound just as you want.

I have posted on this program so if you want to see an example look here

Ideas for using this software are:

-Making audio books with sound effects and more.

-pod casting

-movie making. If you know movie maker it only allows you one line of audio. This is a pain when it comes to adding vocal if you already have background music. Using Kristal you can mix the vocal and music plus more together before importing it into movie maker.

One con to Kristal is that it does not export to MP3. So I use either Audacity or mp3-2-wav converter which is also freeware.

Here is a screen shot.




Audio Recorder for Free : If you don't want to do anything but record a simple bit of audio then this is the freeware for you. If you have tried using Windows Sound recorder and find it only records 60 seconds of audio then use this. It has unlimited recording time. It will also record in either Wav, Mp3 or WMA.

Fairgo Ad Awards

Well done Waipu Primary School for taking out Second spot in the FairGo ad awards.
I worked with this group of kids for 5 sessions to pull this ad together. They did a wonderful job along with their teacher Anne Green. This is the first year they entered and they won $1000 and a flash Canon Video recorder.

Animation in Power Point

This is a Power Point animation I did with 8 kids last year.
We used power point to draw the characters, then worked on individual slides to animate the characters.
Once we had done the animation and automated the slide transitions we captured the slide show using "Freez Screen Video Capture"
Once all is captured we put it all into Movie Maker and narrated it.
Easy!!

GoAnimate

Have a look at this. I have been playing with GoAnimate.
Well worth looking into with your senior class. Great for reading response or follow up.
Also great for those boys who struggle to keep motivated when it comes to doing things on paper.
You could use it for kids who have written a narrative or play to take it to the next level and come up with a neat end product.
You could use it as an introduction of characters for kid to use in a narrative.
A great way for kids to present a message. E.g fire safety, road safety, bullying...



Here is another Example from Laura D'Elia's
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334/post/980032898.html

ICT in the Classroom Ideas.

Click here to see a list of Ideas for ICT in the typical Classroom. PDF File.

Reflections - letting the reigns go

Something I have been thinking about this year is, "does our current education systems allowe for change?".
My thinking is that skills and technology is no longer the major issue in bringing ICT in to schools. The real issue is how, or if, schools will make the "change" happen.
The theme of "letting the reigns go".
When you put inquiry, ICT, and integration together you can no longer work within the parameters of "normal" planning and management systems.

There are two key areas to "letting the reigns go".
1) Teachers need to let go. Teachers need to allow students to take more responsibility in how they communicate their learning. Differentiating the content, process, product and learning environment.
2) The school needs to be more flexible with how individuals plan and manage their classrooms. There seemed to be a consensus between presenters that having too much emphasis school wide focuses can actually stifle creativity and the use of ICT.

Audio books in Kristal

I have been playing around with making some simple audio books in Kristal (Kristal: Click Here to download),


We record each page separately then add sound effects for turn page, and then a bit of music at the beginning and end.


This is what it looks like in Kristal.



One thing you do need to remember to do with Kristal is add "Tabs" from where the recording begins and where it ends. You do this by holding Ctrl and right click on the time line. This allows you to then export as wave.

Waipu TV Add Awards

This year Room 2 at Waipu Primary School, just outside Whangarei (New Zealand), entered a competition to make an add about their local town. It was not to show the "normal" attractions of the area.
Their concept was very original and plays on the towns name.
Why Poo in Waipu.
Worth a look!
What is always interesting about this type of projects is the amount of other skills the kids and teacher learns while completing the task. In this project they learned about google earth, how to capture google earth to AVI (Click here to download Freez Screen Video Capture Software)
combining music and narration using (Kristal: Click Here), editing move, taking good video, capturing video, and so much more.
Along with the technical come the language activities like script writing, story boarding, presenting...

Thanks Allanah!

My first post is a heart felt thank you to Allanah King for coming up to Whangarei to talk to a group of ICT lead teachers and then a staff meeting of "normal" teachers.

Poor Allanah had every single one of her flights up here cancelled or delayed.

Allanah took my lead teachers on a session of podcasting. It was greatfully recived. Infact I have just spent the last 45 minutes with one of the teachers finding some podcasting sites for her kids to listen to in the classroom via itunes.

It was fantasic to work with someone who not just uses podcasts personaly but who also knows how to get kids to make them and sustain a realistic classroom program at he same time.

Here are a few Pic from our day.

Thanks again Allanah!