Friday, November 8, 2013

Green Screen on the iPad

Green screen is one of the best learning tools in our learning commons. Our students are really making their learning come alive by recording video using the green screen.

DoInk has just released a new Green Screen App for the iPad. It is an easy to use App that allows you create green screen in one shot, rather than edit it using iMovie or another video editing application.



For this particular group of stuents, they wanted to be newscasters. We tried covering a desk with green paper and to see if we could make it work. The adjustable chroma filter in the DoInk Green Screen App allowed us to adjust the green colours and also the sensitivity. This worked out possibly better than what iMovie would be able to do.


All we had to do then was move the iPad around to make the size of the student was in proportion in relation to the background image. The finished video was slick! 


We have been trialling different workflows for using this app and then editing video in iMovie on our iMacs. The obvious way is to record the video and use the sync cables to download video to computers. In the absence of cables, we have been trialling the use of DropBox to drop videos in from iPad then downloading them to a share point on our server. It's working well!



Monday, November 4, 2013

Start Simple!

Learning to use the camera app is a great place to start when learning about the power an iPad can play in learning process.

This past month I have begun working with three classrooms who have never really used an iPad before. In my new school we have only had 5 iPads and have not used them a great deal to create knowledge. Last month we borrowed 10 iPads from our Outreach program provided by the CBE ILC (Innovative Learning Commons). 

I thought, what better way to begin using these devices than to use the camera app to take some photos around the school. Here's a snippet of what the three different classrooms did.

Graphemes Around the School

This grade 1 class used the iPad to take photos of letters (graphemes) that they could find around our building. Of course this was an easy task but a great one for students to get excited about finding the different letters they were learning about. 

We created our own success criteria from holding the device to taking the photo, and also to deleting images that weren't worthy of being downloaded.

After we gathered all the photos (which I downloaded from each iPad and then shared to our community folder) we talked about which images were good photos and which weren't so good and why that was.


 

Once all images were accessible from our server, the students then wrote their names (in Comic Life) using the different letters everyone in the class had found. 











Numbers Around Us

This grade one class put a spin on what they would take photos of. They went out around the school building to find different numbers they recognized. This proved more challenging as they found many numbers they could not recognize.



I downloaded the photos, as I did for the letters group. Once we had sorted them them somewhat, students were to choose numbers that were meaningful to them and then create an info graphic based on there chosen numbers. 

  

Colour, Colour Everywhere!

The kindergarten students took photos of different colours around our school. 

Once all photos are gathered in the same manner as above (we have not finished this project yet), we will use comic life again to share our work. We plan on adding photos and the names of each colour to a document then comparing to each other and building on to it further from there.

More to come on this project!