KNBC revamped MS Clubs and Organization webpage

KNBC, Knights Broadcasting Club, a student media club, meets weekly during the school day. Projects from the 2010-2011 school year included Cambridge's contribution to the collaborative documentary project, Mapping Main Street (http://www.mappingmainstreet.org/) and an exploration of new media including Meez, Flipbook, iMovie, ComicLife, GarageBand, iPhoto; in the second half of the year, students put their skills into practice as they developed and ran several seminars on BBN Arts Day in March and produced a variety of short films for the final assembly in June.

In addition to building on these initiatives, members of KNBC 2011-2012 worked on a few longer term projects including photoshop and original short animated films. KNBC meets during study hall on Tuesdays, with the occasional off-campus field trip to locations such as the WGBH studios, Museum of Science and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA).

KNBC's latest project was revamping the Middle School Cubs and Organization page. Students worked in groups using a variety of media to create content for KNBC, Chorus, Science, Community Service, The Spark, Jazz Band, Affinity Lunch, Chamber, D-Squared, Literary Group and BB&N Players. In addition they created this fun video to capture their work.

Enjoy!

6th Grade Glogster and QR Code project

Glogster is a tool that allows your students to make interactive online posters by mixing images, text, music and video.

This year the 6th grade French and Spanish students are using Glogster to complete their MFA ACTion (Arts, Culture, and Technology) projects. All students visit the MFA, and in art class they choose a painter and a painting for a master study.  In French and Spanish classes the students research their painters and paintings to create interactive online posters. Using Glogster, students are able to embed video clips and insert images of their artists and their paintings as well as audio clips of music from the artists' time periods.  Lastly, students can use Glogster to record their own voices in their target languages.  Each glog results its own unique URL.  During technology class, students will turn their URLs into QR codes, and on Sunday, May 13th, the student paintings will be hung on the MFA walls along with the QR codes linking the students' physical artwork to their interactive glogster posters, accessible online via iPads and smartphones.

Below are a few examples of student projects:

Frank Weston Benson

Salvador Dali

John Singer Sargent

If you are interested in learning more about Glogster in the classroom, check out Glogopedia to see sample projects to get ideas on how Glogster could be useful to your students.

For more information on QR codes in the classroom, please see:

Edutopia- Using QR Codes in the Classroom

Edutopia- 12 Ideas for Teaching with QR Codes

The Thinking Stick

KNBC - web page design

The Middle School KNBC club is redesigning the official MS Clubs and Organizations page. Students are creating individual content pages for the Middle School Chorus, Jazz, D-Squared, Community Service, Spark, Affinity Lunch and Science Club. Joseph Clifford, Director of Communications, talked to the kids about the web page design and gave us some tips and tricks for the new webpage.

We are building a new Cool Media resource site - it's a collection of all kinds of interesting media tools. If you have recently discovered a new tool, please let me know - I'd be happy to add it to our growing collection.

And please stay tuned for the launch of the new clubs and organizations page coming SOON before the spring break.

Poetry Project in the English Classroom

For the last two weeks, eight graders were working on composing a series of creative interpretations of the selected poet’s work. Today in class they were presenting and explaining their multimedia piece to the entire class. There were 4 required components to the project:

1. Create a Visual Interpretation of a poem into a comic strip
2. Create a Multimedia interpretation of a single poem: compose the film so that the images enrich the tone, sound and meaning of the poem
3. Write a Biographical Poem that pays tribute to the poet by imagining, in detail, a key event from the poet’s life, using real facts and details garnered from the research.
4. Write an Explication describing the process and the choices that helped make the comic/video/poem.

The videos are made private on our 8th grade youtube Poetry Channel. You must be signed in to view the videos. Please ask Svetlana, Paige, Betsy, Ethan or an 8th grader for a password.

Here are a few examples of student's creative intepretations:

Voicethread - students leave comments using voice, text, audio file or video

8th Grade students used Voice Thread for their first assignment in Spanish. They posted an audio responses to a question: Describe what makes a perfect teacher?