My New Favorite Thing... Adobe Character Animator!

I was scanning Twitter one afternoon this week when I saw a post about an Adobe Education training to use Character Animator in the classroom.  I did a little digging around and OMG!!! I've found the next thing to add to our makerspace.

Character Animator takes a puppet you create in Photoshop or Illustrator and brings it to life.  The software is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.  The movement is creating using face tracking via your webcam.   The lip sync feature uses sound to give the illusion of talking.  Through videos and templates created by Dave Werner (@okaysamuri) I was up and running in no time.  This is the getting started video I used.  You can access his templates and other resources by going directly to the YouTube page for this video and expand the description.

Knowing Illustrator or Photoshop make the process easier, but you can still be up and running using pre-made puppets.  Within 15 minutes, I'd created a simple character and my first video.  It's not pretty, but you can see it here.

The thing I couldn't stop thinking about was how students could use this for projects.  I imagined a student generated Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address or Bud from "Bud, Not Buddy" telling of his adventures from the book as he went searching to find his father.  I imagined an animated school mascot providing announcements on our YouTube channel.  The possibilities are endless.

Heads of Curriculum is another little gem I stumbled across while searching for puppet templates.  They have 8 school related templates:  a skeleton, historical figures and literary characters.

I've already shared this with a couple of our social studies teachers.  I'll be sure to post student generated videos as soon as I have some to share.

Tell Your Story

There are times we have to relearn a lesson we already knew, but for whatever reason abandoned it.

This past school year I was reminded of the need to tell my story.  Over the years I have kept a portfolio of the lessons, activities and collaborations I had completed with teachers.  I have used it as a resource to get a job I really wanted it and for evidence during evaluations.  Above all, I did it for me.  I wanted to be able to look back to see how far I'd grown as an educator and also to see how I'd impacted others.   It was something I took pride in as I'd look back through it.  There wasn't anything really earth shattering, but I was proud of the things I had accomplished over the years.

Then, for lack of a better description, life happened and I became less diligent over documenting what I was doing.  That changed this year.  It started because I needed to keep a record of how we were using items purchased through a grant.  It turned into a way to get teachers and students excited about the new resources we had available.

There are a million different ways to do this.  There will be things I'll keep and things I'll do differently next year.  Regardless of where you start,  it's extremely important to document what you do and then share it.  Here's what I did...

1.  Set up a master folder:  I set up a master folder in Google Drive that I shared with administrators and our technology director.  Whenever I documented a new activity, I would set up a folder specifically for the activity so I could share the documentation with the teacher.

2.  Kept a spreadsheet:  Every time I planned/ completed an activity with a teacher I added the information to a spreadsheet.  I included the date range, number of students involved each day, grade level, subject, project, description, and tools used.  This was also added to the master folder.  It served as something like a table of contents.

3.  Pictures:  I took tons of pictures of every activity.  If I didn't, the teacher did.  Our teachers are made aware of students who cannot be photographed and I was careful not to include those students. These pictures were loaded in a folder under the master folder.

4.  Social Media:  Our school does a great job of leveraging the power of social media to share the great things happening.  I would post to my own Twitter account or have them posted on our school's Facebook and Instagram pages.

5.  Blog about it:  The blog was a bit of an afterthought.  I used this as a way to go into greater detail and to post helpful tips for others to be able to use.  I did a lot of backtracking to set it up, but it's something I want to continue for the future.

What was the impact?

1.  Evidence:  First and foremost, I had evidence of what I was doing and the impact being made with students and teachers.  I used this to fill in gaps for my evaluation, to help with our grant, to see how many unique experiences I had helped to create for students and to share sample projects with teachers.  I was able to provide the exact number of projects, students and teachers I had worked with this year.  When you can walk into your principal's office and provide hard data, it makes a difference.

2.  Reflection:  I was able to look back over the year to see the areas I excelled and those that needed work.  One thing that stood out for me was the fact that I had little impact on Math classes.  I wasn't surprised by this, but it confirmed what I knew.  Math is my weakest area.  I am not as familiar with math at a middle school level and have a hard time being able to just say, "Why don't we try this?  My homework this summer has been to start working through a Khan Academy 6th grade math class online.

3.  Ideas:  I started creating a monthly newsletter in which I shared completed projects, pictures, and data with fellow teachers.  This helped to show teachers what was available and how it could be used in their own classrooms.  I could count on hearing from a few new teachers after the newsletter went out.  That was a couple of more I could reach.  The thing that helped the most was their knowing that they didn't have to know how to work the equipment.  They just needed to provide the option for students and I would take it from there.

My challenge for you.
So here's my challenge for you for this upcoming school year.  Document what you do and share it.  Administrators can't or won't walk in for every amazing thing I know takes place in your classroom.  Parents can only go by what their children tell them.  (My boys always answered, "Nothing much." When I asked what they did at school each day.) If you are telling your story, no one has to guess.

One word of caution:
Make sure you follow your district's policy for posting student pictures and work.  It never hurts to send home your own permission forms to parents to make sure it's ok to photograph and post on social media.  Its' better to be safe than sorry.

Best of luck!

It's Been an Amazing Year!

In looking back over the past school year,  I have to admit that it's been a pretty amazing year.  The biggest highlight was getting our maker space up and running.  Students learned to use the new tools to create and enhance their classroom projects.  Teachers saw the media center as more than just a place for language arts teachers.  The results of the process included collaborating with 18 teachers and over 1900 unique student uses of our resources.  

There are several ways to set up a makerspace.  Our schedule didn't allow us a great deal of free time where students could come to just explore the tools.  Unless the use was part of a project, they were missing instruction.  So that's how we incorporated the makerspace tools.  Teachers included products created using the tools as part of their projects.  3D printed items and green screen videos were the most used tools.  I'm excited that we've added a sewing machine, the Arduinos, Lego robots, a stop motion camera, Bloxels and CUE robot to the tools students can use next year.  

My most successful collaborations were with our Social Studies teachers.  Their content allows for some pretty creative projects.  My biggest challenge came with working with my Math teachers.  I do not know the content like I do for other subjects.  That is one of my own personal PD goals for this summer.  I want to become more familiar with the content so I know how to integrate the tools without taking away the from the content.  

The key piece that made it all come together was the collaboration with teachers.  I have to admit that we have a pretty unique  staff.  For whatever reason, we just gel.  That made collaborating this year so easy and fun.  I didn't have to have formal meetings or make them sit through something that didn't apply to them.  Most of the time it started with either my asking what they were covering or them saying, "Hey, I have this project..."  The end products from the students were awesome.

One other thing I need to help find balance for are the books.  I didn't do as much library "stuff" this year as I normally do.  I focused more on the tech.  We are going back to AR next year, so I have find a happy medium to ensure both get the attention their due.

Share the Great Things Happening

One thing that I've learned this year is that it is important to both keep a record of the good things that are happening in your media center and to share it.  If you follow my on Twitter (@misstizzy), you'll see pictures of the activities as they happened in the media center.

I also used Smore to create monthly newsletter beginning in February so share with staff.  I wanted them to see projects that had been done with other teachers and possibly give them ideas of things we could try together.

Here are the three that I shared.  Enjoy!

February

March

April

Let the Sparks Fly

After working through scheduling issues, the STEM teacher and I were finally able to set times we could introduce her students to the Thinkabit Lab(TM) program.  We would work with her two classes of 8th graders over a 3-day period.

To prepare for the lessons I added a few touches to the media center to make it more like the lab I visited.  First I added dry erase vinyl to some of the tables.  I already had two removable whiteboard table tops built by our fabulous maintenance department staff.  The table tops could be added or removed as needed.  The other was to find a way to put all of the creating resources we were sent in a mobile storage space that would allow students easy access.  The lab I visited had all of the items out in the open, but since my space is also the media center I opted for a pretty creative alternative.  I purchased 4 of the small rolling storage drawer sets from Walmart and zip-tied the together.  This gave me 12 drawers to hold the supplies plus a work area.  I'll add pictures of this later.  

Day 1:  Circuits and Schematics

Supplies - LED, 3V coin battery, Circuit Scribe Pens, paper, dry erase markers, Arduino, wire, breadboard, resistor, laptop, USB Cable

The activity started with explaining the parts of a circuit and drawing the schematic on the whiteboard tables as we went along.  Students learned the correct symbols for LEDs, power, positive and negative.  

From there, the students used the Circuit Scribe Pens to draw the positive and negative lines to connect the LED to the power source.  If done correctly, their LED lit up.  

They were then introduced to the Arduino and it's parts. Students connected the Arduino to a laptop for power.  We drew a new schematic that included a resistor.  Students then used the wires, resistor, and LED to connect the breadboard to the Arduino to light the LED.  

Day 2:  Schematics and Servos

Supplies - Servo Motors, wire, Arduino, laptop, USB cable

After a quick review of schematics from yesterday, students began learning to write code to program a servo motor to move.  They were taken line by line through code to name their servo, learn key commands, how to change direction and speed.  The last part of class was spent explaining their final project.  

Students were shown examples of final projects I saw during my visit to Falls Church.  Then they worked with their partner to come up with a plan for the project they would make the next day.  There were some pretty cool ideas in the works.

Day 3: Creation Day

Supplies: servos, wire, Arduino, laptop, USB cable, and everything but the kitchen sink!

Today was D-Day.  Students had 40 minutes to create and program their project.  They did an amazing job.  Students hot-glued, taped, and tied their pieces together to create some pretty inventive projects. We had tail-wiggling skunks, jumping fish, catapults, windmills, a feeding giraffe and a football going to the goal.  

I was really proud of them and I think they were a little proud of themselves, too.  Best of all, they wanted to know when they could do it again!

You can find the fully scripted lesson here.

Rokenbok Challenge

Our district is located in rural North Carolina in a farming community.  Our county seat is Hertford.  It's a beautiful little town situated on the Perquimans River.  We do not have large industries in our area.  The school district is the county's largest employer.  Many of our residents work out of county or in the Hampton Roads area.

What we do have is an amazing community that pulls together to help ensure our students still have

access to resources to help teach them what they need to be successful adults.  One of those people is our CTE Director.  She is constantly seeking grants to put resources and people in our schools to move our students forward.  We have a middle school Biotech teacher who helps to run our working greenhouse, a STEM teacher who is teaching students coding, how to use the 3D printer and so much more.  One grant that our school was awarded was used to purchase Rokenbok kits

Rokenboks are like Legos and K'nex on steroids. You can build moving objects and use Rokenbok's version of the Arduino- ROKduinos - to program the blocks to move and perform tasks.  It's where design and engineering meet technology.

For this activity I worked with our CTE Department and 6th grade teachers to bring in students to

complete a set of engineering challenges.  Students had to build and create various objects.  The final project was to use the remote control car kit to design something that would move.

Students were placed in teams and given the various challenges.  The teams earned points by completing the tasks quickly and accurately.  The event lasted 2 hours and was filled with laughter and a little competition among teams.

Inspired by Qualcomm (R) Thinkabit Lab (TM)

I was scrolling through Twitter one afternoon and ran across this article: https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2017/11/eng-cedar-point-tech-lab.html about how a school was creating their own Thinkabit Lab(TM).  My curiosity got the best of me and so I hit up Google to learn more.  What I found was that Qualcomm has these labs set up at their headquarters and at Virginia Tech.  Teachers schedule trips to the labs.  Students learn about careers at Qualcomm or in their area and then learn to write basic code to program an Arduino to light LEDs and turn servo motors.  During the final couple of hours students design and create their own moving project with the help of the Thinkabit Lab (TM) instructors and present them to their group.  Everything I saw shouted "find out more"!  So I did.

I could really see this as something that our students would not only benefit from, but would have fun learning in the process.  I knew it would be a great addition to our maker space and provide students with another tool to use to create projects.

I filled out the "Contact Us" form.   I explained our location and how much our students really needed a program such as this.  Within a couple of days, I received an email from a representative at the Qualcomm(R) Thinkabit Lab (TM) in San Diego.  She sent me a very positive email about the possibility of a partnership and asked me to complete an application.  I poured my heart and soul into it - like I said, I could really our students loving this!

A couple of days later I received another email to schedule a conference call.  This was the final step to bringing this to our school if we met their criteria.

The call lasted 2 hours.  They covered the expectations and guidelines and what the project entailed.  My enthusiasm for the project was palpable.  I was concerned that the project would be housed in our media center as a part of our maker space.  The other locations had completely converted a room to mimic their labs in San Diego and Falls Church.  I sent them pictures of our space with the application.  To make a long story short, we became the first Inspired by Qualcomm(R) Thinkabit Lab(TM) in North Carolina!  As a part of this partnership, they would send us the major supplies we needed to get started including 20 Arduino kits.

Then the fun began... I had never touched an Arduino in my life, let alone programmed one.  I do love YouTube!  I purchased my own kit from Amazon and spent hours watching videos to learn to do some basic programming.  The first time I programmed and LED to blink would have made you think I had discovered a suitcase full of money that I could keep!  I was just a little excited.

It was also fun trying to explain the project to people.  They looked at me like I had 4 heads and politely nodded and said "uh-huh" when I animatedly told them how awesome this was for our students.

When the kits came in, I dove right in.  I still wasn't quite confident enough to start the first project yet.  I wanted to see the program in action, so I scheduled a visit with the Virginia Tech Thinkabit Lab in Falls Church, VA.

My visit took place over spring break.  I arrived early to ask the director questions and to take pictures of the layout.  As the day went on, I left with pages of notes, tons of ideas, more confidence that I would be able to carry things out and several examples to show students.  That was the most important part.  I could tell them, but seeing what others created was much more powerful.

Now I just have to get things started.  I'm going to do a small scale project with my club and I've already started talking to our STEM teacher about collaborating on a project.  I'll let you know how it goes!