Audio to Use in Presentations

For places to find digital audio to use in presentations, these are some we often recommend from the HIAT website: http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/hiat/websites/graphics.shtm

Some others from MS Media Specialists Diane Omans and Andrea Christman include:

Creative Commons Search - Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. Their portal provides access to search services to find media licensed under the creative commons license.

Discovery Education Streaming - MCPS has a subscription to this huge databank of graphics, video, and sound. All the media is aligned to content standards. MCPS staff can ask the media specialist for the login/password. You can attend an MCPS training (put "streaming" in the course title field of the PDO) or view the professional development resources within DE Streaming. Student can be provided their own accounts for home and school use as well.

Jamendo is a great place to find free music to use in your presentations. all music is free and legally usable. To find music that suits your needs, search descriptors of the tracks. From the "Music" menu, choose "Tags."

Soundsnap contains many sound effects and loops, organized in an attractive and easy to use interface. You can download 5 files a day with a free account.

Teacher's Domain - an extensive library of free digital resources from public television and other leading media producers, designed for classroom use and professional development. You can store and categorize materials that you find. You must complete a free registration process to download materials

Wikimedia Commons - This site is a repository of graphics, sound and video uploaded by the users. The vast majority of files are either in the public domain or under a liberal copyright license which allows you to use them as long as you give credit back to the authors.

What sites have others found useful for this purpose? Any better than others for students to interact with directly (e.g. only safer, controlled content)?

Kurzweil Implementation

A group of MCPS teachers met yesterday to talk about how using Kurzweil is working in various schools across the county.  Some of the major points that were discussed:

• There are many different ways to make it work depending on administrative support, number of Kurzweil licenses that you have, and buy-in from the staff.
• The critical piece is communication.  One person said that although she is not tech-savvy, she is successfully coordinating the use of Kurzweil in her building because she has good communication skills and is able to connect different departments in her building: IT support, special ed teachers, general ed teachers, paraeducators, and administration.
• It doesn't matter who you are.  The people in our discussion group who were taking the lead in implementing Kurzweil usage were paraeducators, special ed teachers, and even speech/language pathologists!

Two issues that people were interested in networking and learning from each other about were:

1. How to increase the use of Kurzweil despite the fact that many classrooms only have one or two computers.  We discussed several strategies:
• using the LCD or Promethean board as a teaching tool to model strategies that you want students to be able to do later when they are using Kurzweil at the computer.  In this way, their experience with Kurzweil is not limited to those few times that you can get the class into the computer lab.
• making use of computer hubs in the back of a lab or in the media center.  Setting up classroom routines so that students know when and how they are allowed to go to a computer in a different room.
• Advocating for a more convenient distribution of computers around the building.
• Making use of netbook or laptop carts that are available in your building.
2. How to manage testing situations better.  There was a lot of confusion about what is permissible regarding storing tests on the school server, whether password protection of the digital file was sufficient for test security, what media you can copy a test to - flash drive or CD, and whether digital versions of tests should be sent to others by email.  See the October 21 post about password protected documents for one tip on this topic.

What works well at your school?  What more would you like to know about how others are implementing Kurzweil?

Copying Images from Inspiration

You can copy images from the Inspiration image library to use in other programs.
Open Inspiration and pull the image onto your organizer from the Symbol Palette.
Right mouse click on the image and select "Copy".
Open the Paint program in Microsoft Windows (on all MCPS computers). Paste the image into the Paint program.
Resize the image or frame around the image if needed. Save the image where you want to access it later. When you save, choose ".jpg" or ".bmp".

Delivering Password Protected Documents to Students

Are you struggling with how to deliver teacher created quizzes and assessments for students to access? One method is to: 1) make a password protected document for each class with its own unique password, 2) add the document into the appropriate folder (e.g. "McGrath" and "Period 2") on the school's "handout" folder. Provide the students that period's password and have them open the document. This can be done in Adobe PDFs (you will need to open the PDF in Adobe Professional, which is on the school network), Word docs and Kurzweil files. Click on the prior links to learn how.

Creating Accessible Worksheets from the Online Curriculum Archive

Screen demo of how to get a worksheet out of the guide on the Online Curriculum Archive and make in an accesible format as a PDF or Word

Creating Comic Strips Online

More and more options are out there for students to create comic strips online. Check out Adrian Bruce's website, The Teacher Toolbox, and the page for online tools for making comic strips. Another interesting option is xtranormal.com

Please share additional sites by commenting below!

Finding digital images you can use freely

Creative Commons is a new copyright designation that is gaining popularity on the web.  Media posted to the web under a Creative Commons license means that you can copy and use that media for your own creations under some conditions.

You can search Flickr for pictures that are licensed under Creative Commons.  This video tells you how.

• More resources for finding digital content is on the Graphics Websites page.
• Help with using digital media is on the Graphics Quick Guides page.

What are your favorite sources for finding digital media?