Everyone has a story to tell. With Storybird, there’s no excuse not to. It has incredible artwork in a variety of styles. It’s easy. And if you don’t try to play with it when it’s overloaded (which it must have been last night), it’s quick, too! What a cool idea. I think this may be what we do in our first Jr. Tech Camp this year. By the way, I read about this in the Read Write Web blog and also in Scott Holcomb’s blog.

Check out my life story… …so far, anyway.

Keep reading and keep learning!

Our third South Side Middle School Jr. Tech Camp was a big success! My criteria for success is fairly simple. If the students enjoy what we’re doing and have fun with it, it’s a success. If excitement, laughter, and spontaneous applause are any indication, our campers definitely enjoyed themselves.

Since our theme for this six weeks is Memphis, our campers used pictures from around town to learn how to crop and edit digital photographs and create their own slideshow, using Memphis music.

Last weekend, my husband and I drove around town, taking pictures of Memphis’ major attractions, colleges, businesses, historical interests, etc. I ended up with about 100 pictures but pared it down to 50 photographs, which I loaded onto my flash drive. I also compiled a CD of 8 songs related to Memphis. It didn’t take very long, then, to upload the pictures and songs into iPhoto and iTunes on each of the laptops we were using for this camp session.

I had originally planned to use Picasa (I really like Picasa!) but later decided it’d be better to use our Mac laptop cart in the library instead of our computer lab downstairs. Our laptops have older operating systems that won’t support Picasa for Mac, so we stuck with iPhoto. It worked beautifully for our purposes. The students’ artistic flair was apparent as they adjusted the tint and slanted the pictures to create “art house” photographs. I was impressed!

I intended to export the slideshows to iDVD and burn them onto dvds for the campers to take home. I knew our laptops didn’t have dvd burners but thought that I could use an external dvd burner instead. It didn’t work. I’m still determined to get these beautiful slideshows loaded onto dvds so the kids can play them on a dvd player at home. I’ll post later and tell y’all what hoops I have to jump through to get that done.

In the meantime, here is an Animoto video of some of our campers pictures. I love what they’ve done!

A few of our happy campers from past Jr. Tech Camps here at South Side Middle had a nice visit yesterday afternoon with Linda Eller, Prof. Dev. Coordinator in the district’s technology department.  Ms. Eller recorded a podcast of our campers describing their experiences in our two previous Jr. Tech Camps.  In addition, I was able to give them a preview of our upcoming Jr. Tech Camp.  We look forward to hearing the podcast when it is uploaded to our district website!

Thank you, Linda, for your interest and support!  Thank you, jr. tech campers, for staying after school to talk to Ms. Eller.  Y’all all did a great job!  And thank you to Ellan Thompson, our South Side Middle tech savant, for all your time and expertise!

We held our 2nd SSMS Jr. Tech Camp last Thursday after school.  Our jr. tech campers were shown a historical review of campaign posters from the mid-1800’s through today, highlighting the symbols and slogans used by past and current politicians.  They were then let loose with Scholastic’s Create A Campaign Poster online activity to create a campaign poster of their own.  I was very impressed with their posters.  Thank you to Sherwood Middle’s wonderful librarian, Karen Smith, for telling me about this online activity.  Our students loved it and it fit perfectly with our 2nd six weeks’ Presidential Election theme!

You can see some of our happy campers and a few of their creative campaign posters in the following Animoto video…

We’re FINALLY just a few weeks away from our presidential election.  There are many very good websites devoted to looking at the candidates, their parties, and the issues.  

Scholastic News Online highlights the Presidential Election of 2008 with information geared specifically to kids.  It includes details about each of the candidates, discussions of the debates, tips from news reporters like Brian Williams, Kids Press Corp blogs, and Election/Campaign-related games.

In our 2nd SSMS Jr Tech Camp, we’ll be using Scholastic’s online Create A Campaign Poster activity to give students the opportunity to explore the images, symbols, and slogans used to promote candidates for political office.  Jr Tech Campers will create campaign posters, using borders and banners, portraits and pictures, slogans and symbols.  I hope they have as much fun with it as I have!  I’ll let you know how it goes…

We did it!  We held our first SSMS Jr. Tech Camp after school today.  We taught our jr. tech campers how to create themselves as cartoon characters in Bitstrips.  I thought it went well.  Granted, my expectations were somewhat limited.  There were a few “no shows”, but that ended up being a blessing when several of our computers froze.  Bottom line, though, each jr. tech camper was able to participate and all left happy and asking when the next Jr. Tech Camp session would be.  I call that a success!  Let me say, though, that it wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of our school’s technology savant, Ms. Thompson.  Thank you, Ms. Thompson, for your help and expertise!

Due to some initial concerns, teaching the students how to use Bitstrips to create their own characters ended up being alittle more time-consuming on the front end.  I wanted to control the bitstrips accounts used during camp and have access to the characters they created once camp was over.  For these reasons, I created 25 bitstrips accounts (for camp use) in advance.  To do this, I had to create 25 email addresses in advance.  (Bitstrips only allows one account per email address.)  Beyond that, I documented the main steps of character creation through a series of screen snapshots that I added to a PowerPoint of simple instructions.  PowerPoint handouts were printed.  I’m not sure the PowerPoint presentation was that necessary DURING the camp.  The students were too excited about creating their characters, changing their look, their expressions, and the color of their clothes, to pay much attention to the slide show at the front of the room.  They seemed to like the handouts, though, and that made the PowerPoint creation worthwhile.

I guess the only frustating aspect of this afternoon was that, despite my preparation, some of the computers didn’t cooperate.  I made a point of going into the lab well in advance, attempting to pull up the internet and log onto bitstrips on each of the computers.  Four of the 26 computers wouldn’t access the internet, which was okay because I had 22 students signed up.  I had each computer logged on to a different bitstrips account (which I’d created beforehand).  Everything was ready when the students arrived.  THEN, with the first keystroke to actually create a character, six or seven of the computers froze.  Some confusion ensued as those students who had functioning computers were restless to keep going and Ms. Thompson and I were trying to help the students with blank screens.  Once we admitted defeat with the frozen computers (fairly quickly), it didn’t take too long to rearrange students, have some double-up (with some grumbling, of course), and get going again.  Students who finished first gave up their computers to those students who hadn’t yet had a turn and everyone was able to participate.  The upside is that I was able to explain the computer problem to my principal and ask that the library have access to a laptop cart so the NEXT jr. tech camp can take place in the library with laptops.  He agreed.  Woo Hoo!

Check out our happy campers on the following Animoto video…

… It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Little mini techie sessions for students (and those teachers who want to sit in) to see some of the cool stuff I learned about at Tech Camp last summer.  …our very own Jr. Tech Camp, chunked into small after school sessions.  The first one is this Thursday afternoon.  I’ll be showing them how to use BITSTRIPS to create cartoon characters and comic strips.  I’m excited…. ….and nervous.  My first concern was that I wouldn’t be able to get students interested enough to stay after school for this.  Shortly after that, my second concern was that I might have too many students interested and not enough room in the computer lab.  A flyer went home today, asking for permission slips back by Wednesday.  I’m going to try to have students’ bitstrips accounts set up prior to the Thursday session.  I’ll keep you posted on how this goes…

Deciding on what to cover in this first session wasn’t too difficult.  Since I’ve posted a cartoon character of myself on my library door this year, created at www.bitstrips.com, I’ve had a number of students and teachers ask how I made it.  I thought this would be a good place to start our tech adventures, letting the students create themselves as a bitstrip character.  If time permits, they can create a comic strip as well.  In addition, this session fit well into our 1st six weeks school theme “Who Are We?”.  Like I said… …It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Wish me luck!