Group items tagged

"Puppet creation requires making mistakes. Your first puppet will always be very, very special. Students learn fairly quickly that what they see in their mind is not the same as what they can make with their hands. Abraham Lincoln turns into a Rastafarian cyclops. Taylor Swift becomes a married older chicken. Mistakes in puppet making allow kids to fail in a very low-risk way. They get a practical lesson in imperfection. They also get a lesson in following directions. Some students cut a hole, rather than a straight line, for their mouth. Helping them fix their mistakes reinforces the establishment of a growth mindset."

"Today in our fifth grade Sunday school class, we used my iPad2 to shoot short finger puppet videos. Two students edited the six episodes into a single, three minute video using iMovie for iPad after class. "

"I've previously posted several times about how much I love the Shadow Puppet app - there isn't anything out there that's an easier tool for creating a quick audio-narrated slideshow. It's perfect for English Language Learners. Today, the company behind Shadow Puppet has just released another new and free educational app that looks like it could be very useful. It's called Seesaw, and basically lets students easily create digital portfolios that can be shared with teachers and parents. It's free for teachers and students, and has a free and paid version for parents."

"When you're the big fish, it's not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can. That's an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it's wrong to bully others. The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. "You felt like you were in that story," she said. "By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn't good, and why you shouldn't act this way." The puppeteer's show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students' compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students' scores on writing tests. It's just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn't at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research - which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted. "Arts learning experiences benefit students in terms of social, emotional, and academic outcomes," write researchers Dan Bowen of Texas A&M and Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri. The study, released Tuesday through the Houston Education Research Consortium, looked at elementary and middle schools - which predominantly served low-income students of color - that expressed interest in participating in Houston's Arts Access Initiative. There appeared to be significant need: nearly a third of elementary and middle schools in the district reported lacking a full-time arts teacher."

"I recently participated in a SimpleK12 webinar "Stories on the Go: Digital Storytelling with Mobile Devices" with presenter Shelly Terrell. The audience for this presentation was elementary school teachers and people like me who have discovered SimpleK12 as a valuable resource. The presentation was very basic but did introduce me to a wonderful new app. I had heard of it, but this time I gave it a test drive. "

"At TeachMeet Nottingham, Friday 30th March, I spoke about my work with Apps Based Learning on iPad and how Puppet Pals and Morpho Booth has been effective in bringing story language to life in my Reception class."

"While there are so many iPad apps that deliver content, I think the one of the best uses for technology in education is to make something with what you're learning. This might include producing a video, authoring a digital book, recording a puppet show, creating a college, narrating a slideshow, designing a comic book, or somehow making your own media and study aids. Yes, there are loads of drill and skill apps, digital books, and electronic response systems that can be very useful in classrooms. What's much more exciting to me are apps that empower students to be creative and expressive."

"Two 5-year-old boys, one with autism, were having some friendly playtime when they had a communication breakdown. One boy didn't respond to the other and walked away. The ignored kid got frustrated and pushed over a small staircase, causing the first boy to fall. Their speech therapist, Jordan Sadler, decided to address the issue by recreating it in an iPad app called Puppet Pals. She restaged the scenario as a movie, even taking photos of the room for the background and of the kids for the characters. Using the app to show an instant replay of the scuffle, Sadler and the kids identified what went wrong and then recreated the scene, this time making better decisions. Creating custom stories to help kids learn communication skills or understand complex situations is just one of the ways parents, therapists and educators have taken advantage of tablets to work with kids with autism."

"There are already a lot of apps in Apple's App Store for iPad and iPhone (over 1.5 million), and more are added each day. In fact, this month an average of 1,400 apps have been submitted to the App Store. Despite the outrageous number of apps, only a small percentage end up piquing my interest. The apps I get most excited about are ones that are open-ended. I like to make things, and I love it when an app empowers students (and teachers) to create digital productions. Shadow Puppet Edu, Adobe Voice, and TeleStory are three apps that facilitate creativity. They provide students a way to retell stories, explain concepts, or persuade an audience."

"You see it everywhere in K-12. Kindergarteners design toys for their friends to practice empathy, while learning to use a saw and glue-gun along the way. Second graders deepen their understanding of character traits while designing and sewing puppets to represent a character in a folk-tale. In high school physics, students make wind turbines in order to internalize an understanding of how magnetism can create electricity. The "it" I'm referring to is "Making," and simply put, Making is any activity where people create something, often with their hands."

"You see it everywhere in K-12. Kindergarteners design toys for their friends to practice empathy, while learning to use a saw and glue-gun along the way. Second graders deepen their understanding of character traits while designing and sewing puppets to represent a character in a folk-tale. In high school physics, students make wind turbines in order to internalize an understanding of how magnetism can create electricity. The "it" I'm referring to is "Making," and simply put, Making is any activity where people create something, often with their hands. I often define Making by looking at what people bring to the Maker Faire, which does include more technical aspects like 3D printing, physical computing and programming. But Making also includes woodworking, growing food, making art and crafts."

"Your students created a wonderful puppet show or movie and turned it into a stunning video that you want to collect, assess and share ... yet you're not exactly sure how. Sound like a familiar scenario? Simple workflow headaches like this can create serious speed bumps in your iPad program. Let's take a look at a few potential solutions."

"Robotic Prototyping Created with flickr slideshow. Objectives By the end of this unit, learners will be able: To define and describe a robot, its functions, and what it can and cannot do. To design a robot prototype that can serve humankind. To express new insights and learning about robots through oral communication."

"Soundplant turns your computer keyboard into a versatile, low latency sound trigger and playable instrument. Via drag-and-drop, easily assign sound files of any format and length onto 72 keyboard keys, creating custom soundboards that put hours of instantly-playing audio at your fingertips with no extra hardware needed. Soundplant is used for live music and sound effects, as a drum pad, as a unique electronic instrument, as an educational aid, and just for fun - in radio, television, theater, podcasting, presentations, studios, classrooms, arenas, clubs, museums, and churches - by DJs, musicians, engineers, sound designers, composers, teachers, magicians, puppeteers, comedians, public speakers, gamers, and more."

"Last week, Mona Lisa smiled. A big, wide smile, followed by what appeared to be a laugh and the silent mouthing of words that could only be an answer to the mystery that had beguiled her viewers for centuries. A great many people were unnerved. Ars Technica Join Ars Technica and Get Our Best Tech Stories DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX. SIGN ME UP Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy Mona's "living portrait," along with likenesses of Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dali, and others, demonstrated the latest technology in deepfakes-seemingly realistic video or audio generated using machine learning. Developed by researchers at Samsung's AI lab in Moscow, the portraits display a new method to create credible videos from a single image. With just a few photographs of real faces, the results improve dramatically, producing what the authors describe as "photorealistic talking heads." The researchers (creepily) call the result "puppeteering," a reference to how invisible strings seem to manipulate the targeted face. And yes, it could, in theory, be used to animate your Facebook profile photo. But don't freak out about having strings maliciously pulling your visage anytime soon. "Nothing suggests to me that you'll just turnkey use this for generating deepfakes at home. Not in the short-term, medium-term, or even the long-term," says Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. The reasons have to do with the high costs and technical know-how of creating quality fakes-barriers that aren't going away anytime soon."