This sneak peak is of a music education resource we are currently making with the amazing Karen Carey and the very talented Ironwood Ensemble! For this project we are commissioning U.K. illustrator Rebecca Burgees to create a series of three caricatures of the great composer. Here is the Home page:
UPDATE August 2016: maybe an iBook…
Sssshhhhhh!!! We have been working on a very secret exciting project for the last couple of weeks and are now ready to share the cover art! Read More
I haven’t blogged for over a month because I have been so excited about our adventure to… drum roll please… South Korea!
This is the view from the roof of our school: Taejeon Christian International School in Daejeon Techno Valley. My gorgeous talented husband will be teaching Music in the High School and I will be teaching elementary – grade level is to be decided at a later date. This is such a big thing for us: moving to another country, Caleb and I going to school full time… but I think it is going to be the best thing for our family. I feel so blessed that we will be moving into a Christian community and all that that entails; bible study, Church and just being around like minded people. I also feel blessed that we are moving to a school that has a focus on academics and sees their students as future leaders.
We have so many things to do: passports, Ebaying all our stuff, buying snow clothes… But once I start in the classroom in July I plan to use this blog more regularly… well, thats the plan anyway 🙂
Christmas is behind us and I am back reading the Guided Inquiry book I started about a month ago. I have been reading it when I get a spare moment but I did get a little side tracked by a Kindle Christmas present from Samuel: Finding your Element by Ken Robinson. I, like many, have been somewhat entranced by this Englishmen both as a presenter of TED talks and as a author of Out of Our Minds. I had heard about the Element book and so I was happy to see it on the iPad ready to be devoured on Christmas morning. I have read the book, completed the majority of the exercises, and have decided that Technology Integration in education is where I want to be headed towards… I think it might be my element… I can’t be certain till I get there but everything seems to be pointing there… 🙂
Next post is more about guided inquiry…
Here is a big “thank you, thank you, than you!” to the amazing staff at Coursera and Wisconsin University for working so hard on the Video Games and Learning MOOC I have just finished and thoroughly enjoyed.
Particular thanks to Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire. You are both amazing and I am so very grateful for your work.
Further Reading: http://www.news.wisc.edu/22184
Armed with our new website and prepared with the experience of the Happy Prince, we were over the moon when International Grammar School approached us to do another iBook. This time it was a much larger project: three books publishing compositions of three classes of Year 8 students.
Armed with our new website and prepared with the experience of the Happy Prince, we were over the moon when International Grammar School approached us to do another iBook. This time it was a much larger project: three books publishing compositions of three classes of Year 8 students.
This time around the compositions where done on iPads in small groups, the illustrations were drawn my Japanese exchange students to the school, and the narration was done by the Japanese teacher (in Japanese). We used Screenflow to create the intro film. We also used Bookry widgets to view web pages inside iBooks rather than linking and viewing in Safari. The Blue Book is available on the iTunes store here and the two other versions are currently under review by iTunes (a very long and sometimes painful process I must admit). Feedback so far has been very positive – the music staff of IGS are very happy and we tweeted it out to a few colleagues who also thought it was really exciting. Click on the above image to link to our Wrightstuff Interactive iTunes account to download these student created content iBooks.
Our next project with those innovative folks at IGS is in the planning stages and we are very excited to be working with the Music and Art department… stay tuned 🙂
UPDATE: All three books are now available! Click here!
Spurred on by our success we have started a consultation business – Wrightstuff Interactive. It has taken months putting together the website and finishing a few projects but I am really quite chuffed with the results.
Website
As you may know, I have always loved Blogger – in the early days it was just the easiest way for a non-coder like me to customise and make a blog my own.
My first blog was about being a mum. The second was a collaborative project I did with three friends called Women for God – a bible study blog. Both of these have now finished as life circumstances change. Now I have this blog, Green Shoes, about edtech and The Teaching of Kindness – my new and much neglected blog where I reflect on the Christian books I’m reading and Bible studies. These were all created in Blogger.
Meanwhile my devastatingly handsome and ridiculously talented husband Samuel had started his own blog wrightstuffmusic.com. Wanting his own domain, he decided to use WordPress. I of course stubbornly held to my Blogger convictions and wouldn’t even look at the WordPress interface… until now… Wrightstuffinteractive.com is my first attempt at WordPress and I am really pleased with the results. I made all the graphics myself or used CC files off the net. I love white painted bricks so they are the main background texture throughout the site. We bought the Salient WordPress theme and I can not recommend it enough. Not only is it a beautiful responsive theme but Theme Nectar is just about the greatest customer support techie in the whole world! Super fast turn around on questions posted to the forums and a “no question is too hard” attitude.
Next post – our iBooks project
The next three post are really one great long single post so here is the first instalment: the back story…
Last year we worked with students at the International Grammar School to create a iBook. The students were apart of an extension group identified as gifted in music composition that Samuel, as Composer in Residence, was working with. He worked with the student to write music inspired by Oscar Wilde’s story of the Happy Prince. I created the images, narrated the story and then pulled it all together into an iBook. Samuel then published to iTunes.
We were overwhelmed by the response of parents and others that we though, “maybe there is something in this…”
Yay! This week focuses on gaming in education. In the intro today Constance said the participation is over 40,000 people for this course! Thats amazing.
Technology: Inside verse Outside the Classroom.
Cheryl: technology to amplify learning in the classroom
John: technology in competition with classroom
Our goal to move towards creating classrooms were Cheryl is the norm. We should strive to model a integrated technology life.
Games are part of participatory cultures
modding: creating modifications of games and then sharing these mods (qCraft)
machinima: taking video of your game play and setting them to music
game-walkt-thrus: like tutorials that are then critiqued
These participatory cultures bridge technology inside and outside classroom.
Games are just an easy context for learning through interest.
This video is so cute and Mac like i just had to share it. Sorry if this is breaking the rules 😉
General Rap-up:
I have loved this course and all the work Constance and Kurt have done is just down right impressive.
I have learnt about aspects of gaming and research which I didn’t expect to yet I found really interesting.
