Sumo Paint possible alternative to Kid Pix

I am still trying to solve the school's problem with exporting Kid Pix slideshows to QuickTime. I have been experimenting with Sumo Paint which is an online image editor. You can save in sumo format or png/jpeg onto your computer. Unfortunately there isn't a slideshow option! I will continue looking but this is a great tool anyway with lots of options for creating pictures.  I have had a very quick play:

Observations in Action Research

I was very fortunate to work in a Year 2 class yesterday alongside Belinda Johnston who was doing some observations on the effect of Digikid support on children's confidence and engagement in their learning.

The WALT was: create a Kiwiana picture in Kid Pix.  I was working with the class Digikidz, GV and KCS, and four other children.  We co-constructed the WILF together: one Kiwiana item, correct colours, one or two colours for the background, large picture and while working we added typed label and the child's name.  I re-visited the Kid Pix rules with the group and I was pleased they remembered that they only use the large eraser/dynamite stick once and that when creating our own content we don't use the pre-prepared backgrounds, stickers or stamps.  They were easily prompted to use the fill bucket correctly and I reinforced the need to stick to plain colours so they could be easily changed. 

Of the four children, two were paired with a Digikid for one-to-one support and two were working independently.  The idea behind the observation session was to see if the children with support would show increased confidence or engagement or both in their learning. 

The results showed that the children with Digikid support were continually conferencing with each other and were very focused on their learning.  The children who were working independently were on-task for the first five out of ten minutes.  However, in the last five minutes there were many more instances of off-task behaviours.  The full observation can be viewed at - http:fairvresearch.wikispaces.com/ under Project Findings.  I would definately like to repeat this observation using the same children to see if the results are consistent.  Belinda and I discussed that next time she would wait five minutes and then begin the observation and see if there is any difference.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Jo Lynn the teacher and the room 5 children for allowing us to work together.

eLearning Support in Classes

I Have been very busy for the past 2 days supporting teachers and children in their classrooms.  I am encouraging the teachers to plan independent work for their classes so they are available to work together with me and co-teach to develop their own skills and confidence using Kid Pix, Voicethread and the easi-speak microphone which are our focuses for this Term.  It has worked well in most rooms especially where the class Digikidz could be used to support.

Here is a voicethread created by room 4:

It is very similar to the voicethread rooms 11 and 4 made last week during book week with support from myself and Mrs P:

It is interesting how many teachers say repeatedly that they struggle to complete projects that have been started.  I suggest choosing a group, not the whole class, planning the project in parts e.g drawing the picture in Kid Pix the first day, scripting the story and recording it the next day.  Not introducing anything else for that group until the project is completed.  Although sometimes you do need to have a catch up morning to stay completely organised!

I have just wandered through the shared teaching area in Pod 1 and been so excited to see the teacher I worked with this morning continuing on using the skills she learned with other children in her class.  Then in Pod 2 I saw another colleague using Kid Pix in the same way as was demonstrated to her in her in-class support session yesterday.  It is just as rewarding seeing your colleagues achieve success as it is the children!  I am so proud of my team!

Kid Pix Problems Continue

I worked with Belinda today and we still didn't manage to sort out our ongoing Kid Pix problems exporting slideshows to Quicktime and we actually discovered the additional problem of being unable to export pictures to jpeg format. While Googling problems exporting Kid Pix to Quicktime one of the hits was a link to my own post on this blog!

The problem was temporarily solved by taking screenshots of the pictures using Screenshot Studio which can be downloaded at http://screenshot-program.com/ and is a great free tool for PC users. Other options are possible for different prices but the free version works really well and is almost as good as the Mac alternative, or so I have been told!

And then importing into Photostory and then re-recording all the audio. Overall not the easiest way to share our work on a blog. Hopefully our Technician will be able to solve these problems perhaps re-installing the software on each individual PC might be the only option.

Kid Pix Problems

I have figured out, with a little help from my friend Belinda, how to address the problem I've been having with recording audio onto slides in Kid Pix. What you can do is to draw your picture then copy it several times calling it e.g leaf, leaf1, leaf2, leaf3 etc then record one sentence on each slide. Pay attention to the audio indicator as you are recording to keep track of how much time you have left before reaching the maximum size allowed per slide. Then import the slides one after the other without transitions and it will look like one slide but with longer audio. I am going to try this out with the Digikidz next week when I am working in classes. I still haven't solved my problem exporting slideshows to Quicktime but am hoping that if I send the file to Belinda and it works that will mean it's a SPS network error and Quicktime needs to be re-installed to fix the problem. I would really like to get some of the children's fabulous work onto the Digikidz blog and into my wikispace as evidence for my Action Research project.

Kid Pix Problems

I am having problems adding audio to Kid Pix slides. There seems to be a limit to how much you can say on each slide (approx 1 sentence). Can anyone help with where I'm going wrong?!

Action Research Wiki

I have put together a wiki to hold all the data and examples of children's work I am rapidly gathering together at the moment! It can be viewed at: http://fairvresearch.wikispaces.com/ and I would welcome any feedback you might have as this is my first experience with action research. I am currently struggling with a couple of things: the first is how to export Kid Pix slideshows, photostories etc into Quicktime or YouTube to allow me to embed them in my wiki. Photostory is really simple to add to a blog but I have not found Kid Pix slideshows as easy. Hopefully I will solve this problem soon so I can add some of the super work the children have been doing and this will show the progression as they have opportunities to explore the software. The second problem I have encountered is that I can't record long sentences on Kid Pix slides. The Pod 2 Digkidz I am working with did a great job of finding out information about a chosen native tree. They drew a leaf from their tree in Kid Pix then we recorded the audio but I noticed that the program stopped before they had finished speaking and when I played the file it only had recorded part of what they said. BJ said this might be a memory problem. I have looked in the Teacher's Notes and the Help and Settings and can't figure it out. I am now going to Google so watch this space and I'll report back if I have success. Otherwise any Elm Park teachers who are Kid Pix experts I'd appreciate your advice!