Copy Tech is Happening @

The IB Spanish and French classes started blogs and sites this year. For both Spanish and French, students created their own blogs to start posting different types of writing. We discussed blog style, digital footprints, citation of images and comment guidelines. Next semester the student work will evolve to reading each other's posts and making comments. For French 1 and 2, which are more focused on the oral language, students recorded their own voices based on biographical dialogues. These recordings were made directly on SoundCloud, which allows for easy embedding of the recording anywhere. You can see below an image of the class Google Site where students posted their SoundCloud recordings. Guillermo and Cris Matheus report that students are excited about writing on the blog and they can already see how it will become a portfolio for their language writing. The ICT Standard covered is Communication and Collaboration:  "Students use digital media and environments to communi

Every year, the Junior's TOK classes record their "This I Believe" project into a website. The students have to speak for a few minutes about a belief while recording their voice. Their speeches are really worth listening to. The voice recordings can be accessed at the "This I Believe" site link below. Just click on the student picture to play. The words at the top pf each student represent the main idea of the belief. This year, students recorded on their own laptops at home. Mac users recorded with Garageband and PC users recorded with Audacity , which is a free recording software. The ICT Standard for this project is Communication and Collaboration "b. Communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media formats". This I Believe

In HS Math, Ange Molony and Lauren Poll asked their students to create screencasts to explain problems and concepts to their peers. The collection of screencasts was posted on the class website as a resource bank for study. Those screencasts were graded based on very detailed rubrics involving expectations around mathematical processes and communication, for example. In Grade 9 Algebra, students created their screencasts during class choosing among a variety of recording options. As seen on the image to the left, some students used  QOMO tablets  to help with free hand writing of the formulas. We had 4 tablets available for the class. Other students chose to use the mouse over a PowerPoint where formulas were already typed. These examples and the others mentioned can be seen on the videos below. In IB Math Studies, students created screencasts over a software emulator for a TI 84 Graphing Calculator. In this case, no free handwriting was necessary which made the recording process easie

In BSS 10, Kaue asked students to create a city design considering the 4 necessities of human beings: habitat, work, body-spirit leisure and circulation. The design was based on parameters from the French-Swiss urbanist Le Corbusier.  Initially, the groups created a draft on paper then they were able to choose among different options to generate a 3D city maquette. Google SketchUp was offered as a particularly powerful option as it allows moving around a 3D city and looking at it at different angles. Other options chosen by groups were a physical maquette and Photoshop, for example. The image above shows a city model on Google SketuchUp. The different colors indicate specific types of buildings as seen at a copy of a SketchUp legend at the end of this post. Below, you can see an animation of a 3D city created with Google SketchUP. In the animation you can better appreciate the city design. The project covered the following ICT Standard: Creativity and Innovation: "Students demons

 At the IB Year One Visual Arts class, students are getting oral feedback on their workbooks. This feedback used to do be done with post-its at the workbook itself, but they were easily lost, not much could be said, and workbooks were hard to carry around. Now students are scanning their workbooks and saving the images on  Voicethread  , which is a type of slideshow that allows oral, video or text feedback. The image at the left shows one page of the workbook inside Voicethread and Jennifer Carpenter's oral comment on the side, which can be accessed by clicking on her avatar. The students are embedding the Voicethread inside their own Digital Portfolio site, under "a Process and Reflection" page. The cool thing about an embedded Voicethread is that anyone is able to add comments right from the Google Site or Digital Portfolio!