Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

The Learning Toolbox, from James Madison University’s special education program, provides tools, strategies and resources to help students with learning difficulties become better learners.
When you arrive on the site, you can choose “I am a Student,” “I am a Teacher,” or “I am a Parent,” which takes you to an appropriate page for getting around the site. For example, the student page starts with an overview of how to use the site. Then students choose an area they need help in - organization, test taking, studying, note taking, etc. From there, students choose a statement that reflects their needs, e.g. “I have difficulty understanding the main idea when I read,” or “I read slowly.” At that point, the site suggests specific strategies to try.

The site does require some significant reading to understand the strategies, and therefore parent or teacher support may help. Also students (and often their parents and teachers as well) may need help specifying what their specific challenges are. This is a good resource to add.

I’m leading a workshop on Podcasting in the Classroom, and have started to gather some tips and resources on my wiki.  Stop by to check out the presentation as well as my podcasting links.

We’ve just had our first of two weekend workshops for students interested in stop motion animation with Legos and other stuff. I worked with 2 students (4th & 5th grade) who helped lead the workshop, and another 5th grader who signed on for tech support. With 14 other 4th and 5th graders as our students, we piled into school on a Saturday to build sets, set up cameras, and snap away as each group of kids patiently moved their Legos and clay one step at a time until their stories were complete. Next weekend, we’ll pop the photos into iPhoto albums and then into iMovie, adjust playback timing, add sound tracks and sound effects, titles and more.

Our goal is to create a DVD with all the movies that we can then copy and give as gifts to friends and family during the holiday season.

When I work with kids in this way, I am always so impressed by their enthusiasm, hard work and creativity, as well as their willingness to work with and help one another.

We have created a wiki for our program, which you can explore at:

edisonanimators.wikispaces.com/

In preparing for a podcasting workshop this week, I’ve been collecting new podcasting tutorials.  Some helpful finds:

• How to Podcast: Four Basic Steps - Plan, produce, publish, promote…
• How to Podcast - from Podcasting Tools
• Howstuffworks “How to Create Your Own Podcast”
• Make Your First Podcast
• How to Create Your Own Podcast - A Step-by-Step Tutorial on Podcasting

Most of these tutorials rely on Audacity and the LAME encoder. The workshop I’m leading will use Garage Band and iTunes (part of iLife ‘08), since those tools are the focus of a yearlong series of trainings for the teachers I’m working with.  I’ll post links to those materials at a later date!

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  (tags: multilingual free cooltools tutorials language/foreignlang)