Celebrating The End Of The Tech Year!

We had a lot of fun this year using technology while the rest of the 4/5's were at hockey on Wednesday mornings.  We had so much fun learning!  We never felt that we were stuck at school to do work, this was fun work!  We all looked forward to Wednesdays and were excited to work on new projects. 

We had some really fun moments over the year, such as, making a "Harlem Shake" movie on pajama day, using the "Elf Yourself" app before Christmas and sharing laughs during our celebration pizza day! 

The fun that we've had this year wouldn't have been possible without the support and encouragement of our good friends Mr. McKiel, Ms Badger and Zachary FB.  Thank you for coming to our class to work with us and to show us cool tools on both the MacBooks and the iPads.  You have taught us so much!  Also thank you to Mr. Kurapatwa for providing us with ideas to explore during our tech time.  We hope that you can all come back next year! 

Some of the projects, web tools and apps that we have used this year have become absolute favourites! Here is a list of all our favourites, we look forward to exploring with these projects and tools more in the future.

Our Favourites:

Seth - iStop motion movie making on the iPad

Arianne - making magazine covers on www.bighugelabs.com

Efrel - making shadow puppet movies and creating slides on Keynote

Karen - exploring animals on the WWF together app

Jamie - making movies on Animoto

Persia - using Pix Stop Animation to make movies and GarageBand to make music

Kurt - making the Star Wars project on Snap Circuits

Montana - using iMovie to create weather videos and shadow puppets

Inderdeep - using the Movie Storm app on the iPad

Kyrra - making silly Elf Yourself videos

Naffi - making Weather Videos with Discovery Education and iMovie

Cage - using GarageBand to make music

Taylor - using Voki to create talking avitars

Mackenzie - using PhotoBooth and all the cool effects

Angelica - making the Happy Birthday project with Snap Circuits

Emily - creating movie posters on www.bighugelabs.com

Today after we finished our final project Ms Blacker let us explore our favourites, here are some pictures of us during our last tech time.

We will post our final project soon... so please stay tuned! 

Thanks for a great year of Growing and Learning with Technology and thanks for following along with us on our blog! 

Written as shared writing by the Tech Kids and Ms Blacker

From the nerd herd

I just drew this on Doodle Buddy for iPad. With Doodle Buddy you can create awesome drawings on tons of backgrounds and even use cool stamps. Doodle Buddy is also available for iPhone and iPod touch. Check it out at www.pinger.com.

Sent from my iPad

Cage

I just drew this on Doodle Buddy for iPad. With Doodle Buddy you can create awesome drawings on tons of backgrounds and even use cool stamps. Doodle Buddy is also available for iPhone and iPod touch. Check it out at www.pinger.com.

Sent from my iPad

Jamie,Emily ,Mackenzie and Taylor

This is Jamie on doodle buddy

I just drew this on Doodle Buddy for iPad. With Doodle Buddy you can create awesome drawings on tons of backgrounds and even use cool stamps. Doodle Buddy is also available for iPhone and iPod touch. Check it out at www.pinger.com.

Sent from my iPad

img 222×222 pixels

http://delivr.com/qrcodegen/img?bg=FFFFFF&border=4&fg=000000&format=JPG&mode=download¶m2=At%20Brooklands%20school%20we%20like%20to%20share%20with%20others%2E&scale=3&secure=1


Sent from my iPod

From the nerd herd

Voice Record Pro recording April 10, 2013 11:27:51 AM

From the nerd herd

Voice Record Pro recording April 10, 2013 11:27:51 AM

Snap Circuits

Today Ms Blacker pulled out a bunch of briefcases from the basement and we thought we were going to be playing "DEAL OR NO DEAL"!

Turns out these cases were full of snap circuits!  These kits taught us how electronics work by building our own circuits.  We used the project books to build our own circuits,  these books are really easy to follow as the pictures are displayed for us and we can recreate the project from there.

These are the things that we liked about using snap circuits:

Kyrra: I liked building the projects

Hermon: I liked the project that turns the light on and makes the fan spin and I liked the Flying Saucer

Inderdeep: I liked that you can control the circuit with one switch

Seth: I liked the Space War Alarm, it made noise

Montana: I liked the one with the paper clip because it turns the paper clip into the 'on/off' switch

Efrel: I liked the music circuit and the alarm combo

Jamie: I liked the circuit that played music

Angelica: I liked the alarm music doorbell

Arianne: I liked the Space War Alarm combo

Persia: I liked when you turn on the switch and the light goes on and two sounds alternate between each other "birthday" music and an alarm

Naffi: I liked using the switch to turn the light on and off

Emily: I liked the "Lamp Fan Parallel" it makes the fan float into the air

Taylor: I liked all of them because they are SUPER COOL!

Kurt: I liked all of the projects because they were fun!

Cage: I liked the alarm with the Space War combo

Crazy Day!

Today was our last day of technology before spring break and since it's spirit week, we had fun!  We snacked, we danced, we got to pick whatever device we wanted to use to create or play!  Ms Blacker snapped pictures and captured videos of us working together on fun projects.  We had a lot of JOY in our tech time today!  It was fun to just explore! 

Here is a short video of our fun morning together (it was pajama day) and the ending is the "Harlem Shake" video we made!  Enjoy the giggles! 

Animal Presentations

Today we explored two new apps on the iPads.  The apps are: WWF Together (World Wildlife Fund Together) and Haiku Deck.  

WWF Together

WWF Together is an app that teaches you facts about amazing animals.  Ms Blacker air played the WWF Together app and showed us how to navigate through the Giant Panda story.  She told us that we would be able to explore the animals and decide which one we would like to present to the rest of the group. 

Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is an app for creating presentations using simple slides with creative commons pictures.  

After we used the WWF Together app and learned about animals we put that information into a Haiku Deck presentation and shared it with the rest of the group. 

Here are our presentations:
(Please note, there are a few spelling errors in the presentations... we plan to fix those up next week but wanted to share our work regardless)

Stop Bullying

Today Ms Badger showed us how to create motivational posters on the website www.bighugelabs.com - because today is national PINK SHIRT day to raise awareness of bullying and to encourage others to stop bullying we decided to make our posters relate to 'Bully Awareness'.  After we finished the posters we turned them into a short video.  We also had time to explore some of the other cool ways to enhance our digital pictures!  SO much fun!  Thanks Ms Badger for coming to share with us! 

More Weather Videos using Discovery Education

We completed the rest of our videos using Discovery Education videos and iMovie.  We hope you enjoy the videos!

Three Videos

Woohoo!  Three groups finished their weather videos from the Discovery Education Canada clips that we used.  The videos are a representation of what we learned from the original Discovery videos.  We included our selves in the video via 'green screen' technology and recorded a narration of what we learned.  Next week we hope to have more videos completed to share. 






Written by the Tech Kids and Ms Blacker

Weather Videos (Still Continued)

This week we continued again with our weather videos.  We're getting closer to the finished stage but it is a long process.  Two groups have completely finished their audio recording and added music, from www.freeplaymusic.com, to the background.  We had an interesting conversation about why we couldn't use "Gangnam Style" for our music, we have to select music with the right copyright laws.  Free Play Music is a site with music that is permitted to be shared and used by others.   Next week the groups that have finished their audio recording will be ready to film their introduction and conclusion using green screen technology! 

We're all in different stages of the project, but we're getting near the end.  It's taking awhile because we only have one external microphone that each group needs to share to record. 

We're still having fun and looking forward to sharing our final videos with you - we may have a few finished and ready to post next week.

Written by the technology students and Ms Blacker

Continuing With Weather Videos

Today we continued with our Weather Video projects.  We started off by reading our last blog post as a refresher about what we did last week.  After that, we got to work!  We watched our video again to remind us of what we learned.  Then we worked on splitting the video in iMovie and adding the portions that we needed to match what we plan to say.  After our clips were inserted, we started to detach the original audio in preparation for our own voiceover.  Ms Blacker then showed us how to add transitions between the video segments.  Some people are working on transitions while others are still inserting clips and detaching audio, we're all working hard! 

Written by Ms Blacker and the tech group

Weather Videos

Happy New Year to our Technology followers! 

Today we started a new project on Weather because that is what we are learning about in Theme Studies.  Ms Blacker downloaded various movies from Discovery Education about weather.  We picked a topic with our partner and viewed the Discovery movies together.  While we were watching the movies we wrote notes about what we learned about weather from the video.  

After that, we went to iMovie and we created a new project and a new event.  In the new event we imported our weather video.  This is all we had time for today,  in the coming weeks we are going to clip the video into smaller segments, detach the audio and record our own voices explaining weather that we learned from the video.  We also will green screen ourselves into the video as an introduction.  Some of the grade 5 kids have experience with this from last year, the rest are learning for the first time! 

• Persia learned that Tornadoes usually strike in the USA
• Angelica learned that snowflakes are ice crystals
• Efrel learned that the ozone layer is good and bad for the Earth
• Montana learned that the cold air masses pushes the hot air masses up to make Thunderstorms
• Emily learned that when the sun is lower your shadow is taller
• Taylor learned that water vapor isn't a liquid, it's a gas

Written as shared writing by the "Nerd Herd" (our joke name) and Ms Blacker