[qt:/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Orca-by-CB.mpg 413 323]
Recently, I have been attempting to incorporate the 2nd grade’s study of arctic animals into computer lab time. The first attempt was helping the students find images of their assigned animal- polar bear, wolverine, lemming, orca, artic fox, etc. and I quickly found myself drowning in the rather deep waters of fair use and copyright law. A huge part of digital citizenship is learning to use online content appropriately, so we took a detour into the land of fair use- hopefully coming out more educated about appropriate use of images from the web. (I know I now have a rather nebulous understanding of fair use as it relates to educators and students.) Our original photo hunt evolved into a Powerpoint presentation with an image, facts, a Blabberize video clip, and a teacher-generated Works Cited slide. I am thankful for the opportunity to teach and model digital citizenship with these young ones.
The video clip above was created by a 2nd grade student (who also happens to be my son 🙂 ) and embedded into the Powerpoint presentation below. (I cannot find a way to export the .ppt as a movie in a way that allows the embedded .mpg to play- if you know a work-around, please share!) The image was created with TuxPaint and then uploaded to Blabberize. A major shout-out to the creators of Blabberize! That is one cool web 2.0 tool!!!
This child is a very reluctant writer, but was ecstatic about the idea of recording his own voice and sharing the knowledge he has gained about killer whales, or orcas. He happily wrote a full page of dialogue, and then confidently recorded it. I’m very proud of his work, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the 2nd graders as a whole complete these. They are embedding these in a Powerpoint slideshow, which creates a pretty impressive product- especially for an 8 year-old. (Granted, I’ll be giving them the 4 slide template… but still cool, nonetheless!)