What I did in school YESTERDAY 5/3/13

I could write about how today was one of those days where I started at one school and ended at the other.  I could write about how today was dedicated to the physical task of breaking down my laptop labs and preparing them for testing.  I could write about the differences between what this looks like at each school.  I could, but I won't.

Instead, I'll write about how I helped a kindergarten teacher with her students' mystery stories.  Mrs. M. guides her students in small groups to write mystery stories.  She's been doing this for years.  Although I'm not privvy to the actual writing process, the final products are impressive.  This year there was "The President Goes Bowling" and "The Pool Mystery", among others.  In the past, I have videotaped each student reading his or her page in front of a green screen.  The finished video shows the students reading with their pages looming large behind them.  I suggested we try this with iMovie on the iPad this year.  I knew we wouldn't be able to include video of the children reading, but I love the one-stop-shopping aspect of iMovie, and frankly, when it comes to kinders, it's a whole lot easier dealing with just audio. 

Now that we can scan on the copier, it was a breeze to digitalize the students' written (and illustrated) pages.  I learned in an earlier project that the full page view of a scanned 9x12 page does not work on iMovie.  It requires starting on one part of the page and panning to another.  My workaround was to put the images into a PowerPoint, reducing the dimensions enough to display a sizable white border around them.  Then, I saved the PP slides as JPGs and used those image files in the movie.  At that point, all I had to do was pull each child to read over the still picture of their page.  It was an incredible timesaver.  When they were finished, I saved the movies to the camera roll, copied them to my PC, compressed them, and uploaded them to my YouTube channel.  A 2-3 day project took about an hour.