Room 3’s Blog

From the Tech Savvy Educator, Thinking Past The Square and many other bloggers comes information about a collaborative music site.

Muxicall is an excellent example of one of those sites that pulls you in, and eats up your time with just a simple concept; click on a button to play a note. Now click on a few more and try to put together a tune or short musical phrase. Now imagine 6 or 7 other people doing that same thing at the same time on their computers, with all of the notes and tones played at the same time on the website. The result can often be a bit deafening, a bit maddening (when someone cuts in on your solo), but ultimately the site is a lot of fun.
Thankfully, the notes are arranged so that discord among the various players is few and far between. And what results is actually a rather pleasing new-age jazz type of music. Some times a bit haunting, while other times being very bright and bubbly. How is that useful to you as a classroom teacher? Well…you could use it as n anchor activity in the morning, or after a transition; the students would definitely sit down much more quickly and quietly to be picked as the person that gets to “make music” on the internet with Muxicall. You could also use it for moody background music during quiet reading time. Since other people are always on the site making noise, you just have to turn on your speakers. OR, you could find a progressive music teacher willing to introduce their students to some collaborative digital music ideas.

From Amanda,

When you get there it loads easily – hold the shift button and run your mouse over the different block notes. Soon you will start to hear the notes you are selecting and if others are on the site you will hear the notes they are selecting also. Jump into the chat room and have a chat with the others online to collaborate more musically on a piece of work.

Have a play and let us know what you think!

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Check out SpellingCity.com!

Thanks to janenicholls for putting this site on Twitter and to KJ for writing about it on his blog, Welcome to NCS-Tech.

SpellingCity features a dead-simple UI: enter the words and then press Test Me, Teach Me, or Play a Game. You have to see this to believe it! For “Test Me,” you get a place to spell the word plus the ability to hear the word spoken by itself and also in a context-correct sentence! Truly amazing! But wait, there’s more! Select a sound effect to change the pronunciation (my favorite: backwards!) Intrigued by this word-recognition feature, I decided just for fun to see how it would handle some unusual words. Here’s what I went with:

Riboflavin (any Pete & Pete fans out there?)
Xenophobe
Egalitarian
Blogger

I was disappointed (but not surprised) to discover these words were NOT in their dictionary. (I would pay money to hear the site use ‘riboflavin’ in a sentence!) I was very impressed how it handled more common words that would typically be on an elementary spelling list.
Watch for misspellings, though; I intentionally put “dgo” in for “dog” and the system thought I was spelling “go.” The site owners have blocked common obscenities, a nice touch. They even offer support forums!

It gets better! “Teach me” reads the word, spells it, and uses it in a sentence! “Play a Game” gives you a wide variety of quick and easy games based on the list of words you enter. The best part of all is teachers create your own account and manage spelling lists your students can access at home!

This site is really, really fun. Kids will love it and play for hours – memorizing those spelling words along the way! With an interactive whiteboard, this site will turn your spelling practice from drudgery to the most fun they’ll have all day short of recess!

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This web site has been around for awhile but I thought you guys might have seen it – obviously you haven’t so here is the info from Karl Fisch

Inthe spirit of my last post, here’s a chance to have your students work on their vocabulary (English) and fight world hunger at the same time. Free Rice is a website that has a fairly simple premise:Click on the answer that best defines the word.
If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.
For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.FreeRice has a custom database containing thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty. There are words appropriate for people just learning English and words that will challenge the most scholarly professors. In between are thousands of words for students, business people, homemakers, doctors, truck drivers, retired people… everyone!

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you
at the “outer fringe” of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.

Have a go and leave a comment telling which level you reach!

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Just in from several other blogs but this is from Doug Belshaw’s blog, teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk.

Just in time for the new academic year, a guy called Marco has found that the ever-wonderful Google have hidden away a whole flight simulator in the latest version of Google Earth! It’s surprisingly sophisticated for a hidden feature.

For those of you who just want to get straight to it, press (together, with Caps Lock on) Ctrl+Alt+A on Windows. This is the screen you get when you press the 3-button combo:

And from Marco’s blog comes this:

There are only two aircraft to choose from at this stage. The F16 I find is much more enjoyable for a quick stint as it goes much faster than the SR22. Try both though as they’re quite different flights. Then you get to pick a start position. …. Before going wild pressing random keys like I did, have a look at the controls.

Give it a try and leave some comments about how you did!

I mentioned one of these sites to some of you yesterday but tonight I found this information, also from Louise Starkey, Teaching in the Digital Age.

I have come across a couple of interesting ideas in the last week that students may enjoy using as they grapple with the what photo/image issue. The image on the right is me as a Simpson! there are two places to develop one of these- the first Simpsonise me you develop your own choosing different options. The second site also called Simponize me, the one I used, you upload a photo of yourself and the aliens turn you into a Simpson.

This came in a RSS fee tonight from Ian at EdgeoftheSeat.

Singshot is an online karaoke community, and you can join for free.

You can choose from hundreds of songs to sing from, and record your efforts on the site, and listen and comment on other aspiring singers talents as well (no flaming allowed!).

You can even attach your webcam and turn your recording into a music video, and yes there is even a genre section for kids, so that you can get your students to give their renditions of “Do your ears hang low?” and see how they stack up against the rest of the world…

Why not give it a go! Let me know how great it you are!

You think 25:5=5? think again…

I have been waiting for edublogs to be up and running again so that I could post this video.

Strange but interesting

For those who don’t understand: There is no actual warping of the image here. Each row of pixels is being treated as a separate sequence of frames, and is offset from the one below it by a fraction of a second.

What do you think?

While clearing out my bookmarks I found this site, Gullible Info, which I thought you might find interesting. You can subscribe to it through an RSS feed if you are really interested.

I found this at Kevin’s Meandering Mind via Paul Wilkinson who has now set up a wiki at animate our world for anyone interested. He is keen to get going a story exchange using Pivot/ students to share their animations.

The other day, one of my sixth graders asked me if I had ever used Pivot for animation, which led to an interesting discussion about how this freeware software could be used with MovieMaker to create a little animated film.
Here, then, is the premiere of The Incredibly Crazy Clocks, using Pivot to create the animation (it comes out as an animated .gif file), then I imported the file into MovieMaker where I added some original music of mine, and a title, and I got a mini-movie.

You will need to download Alice and or Pivot. I think this may be a good way of showing our fractured fairy tales. What do you think?

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Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Scratch is available free of charge from the Download page.