Learning & Leading Through Technology - September_October

Company

aquafadas.com\en\kidsmotion

popcorn.webmaker.org powtoon.com vialogues.com wevideo.com wideo.co

T he constructivist approach to learning and teaching has been around since before education philosopher John Dewey, but never before have students been able to combine powerful video-mixing tools and online resources with multiple methods of sharing and collaborating. Today, the rapidly growing maker movement promises to promote creativity, productivity, and community involvement in the form of student-made products, including programmable robots, 3D printer designs, and cloud-based productions.

The latest trend is to go beyond the creation of videos, podcasts, and multimedia slide shows to produce mashups, which are combinations of many media elements. The applications featured here enable students and teachers to mix media together and enhance them with personalized add-ons and existing public domain media, such as photos, videos, and music.

Powerful Tools

Popcorn Maker ( popcorn.webmaker.org) allows you to customize instructional presentations, such as Khan Academy videos ( www.khanacademy.org), with your own directions or questions for your students, either with recorded audio or text bubbles. You can also add related links, maps, and live feeds as pop-ups while the video plays (see L&L, May 2013, “Refresh Your Flipped Classroom with Interactive Video,” pages 10–11).

A team at Teacher’s College at Columbia University developed Vialogues, which uses existing videos and sets up a dialog window to encourage conversations about the video. The video could be one of your own lessons, a student skit, or a class debate. As an added bonus, there is an archive of timely, thought-provoking videos with ongoing Vialogue conversations.

WeVideo has the unique feature of offering three levels of complexity to stu-

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dents with different levels of experience and skill. The tool also has a structure to support video editing collaborations.

Kids Motion is a template-driven tool.

It is designed so that young children can choose a theme, add media, and share their videos.

Pow Toon provides animation tools for creating “explainer videos” in the Common Craft ( www.commoncraft. com) style. Wideo also has easy-to-use animation tools with cartoon-like characters that younger children would enjoy.

Sharing and Collaboration

These tools expand the ability to share student productions. You can easily post video to Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, or your own blog or webpage. Most of these applications include collections of existing projects so that students can easily search them, save projects as favorites, and review them later. Some creators are extending the possibilities of their cloud-based mashup tools by developing structures of their own to promote user communities.

Ironically, face-to-face events where all ages meet to show off their creations are booming. Webmaker, a project led by the nonprofit Mozilla, hosts maker parties that include “design sprints, code-a-thons, teen tech bashes, and father/daughter hack jams.” At makerfaire.com you can learn more about the growing maker movement and related events around the world.

No matter what tool you choose, a successful classroom experience includes careful planning and attention to curriculum goals. It is easy to get carried away with eye-catching special effects, but the true value is in the creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication, which happen to be the four C’s in the 21st Century Skills framework and key components of ISTE’s NETS for Students.