Mister Mak's Learning 2.0

VoiceThread as Student led math instruction

Inspired by the Khan Academy video tutorials for math and science, a 6th grade student, his math teacher, and I formulated a way for him to extend his learning of math concepts. He knows the content forward and backward and we needed to provide some extension activities to keep him engaged. So, we thought he could practice explaining different math problems. This first example is a relatively simple one but it challenged him to break down a problem into chunks that could be easily understood and digested by his fellow students. The student's comment was that teaching the math problem was much more difficult that just doing the problem. Hey, a new respect for the teaching profession! ;-)

Take a look at our student's first math screencast and please leave a constructive comment for him. We look forward to more math tutorials in the future!

http://voicethread.com/share/1163164/

Aviary + Scratch = Gaming Bliss

I'm in love! My 7th graders are creating some very interesting Scratch games during the last few weeks of school. One asked about putting a music soundtrack on their project and at first I pointed them to my resource site to dig for appropriately licensed audio files that they could incorporate. This normally works fine for digital stories and the like but I noticed that the students were having a difficult time finding exactly the right sound for their games. The dynamic nature of a computer game is such that music can play an integral part to the overall feeling of the game and the clips they were downloading wasn't cutting the proverbial mustard. There had to be an easy way to score a soundtrack that could be done on a PC. We do have some Macs loaded with GarageBand and loads of loop packs. But they were not accessible when we needed them.

So, what to do?

I remembered that I have recently played with Myna, the audio editor bundled as part of Aviary. Myna has a collection of professionally produced clips that can be strung together to form the perfect song. In the spirit of the song ABACAB from Genesis, you can create any different combinations that works best for you... AABBCCB, ABCCBAC, etc. I showed my students how it worked and then they were off to the races creating their own customized soundtracks with just the right timings and feeling appropriate to a particular point in the game.

I love it when two programs can be used together to create a synergy of creativity!