Repurpose

Here’s how simple this is.
Go to Postcard.FM.
Upload a picture.  Upload an .mp3.  Enter an e-mail address.  Click “preview.”

Voilà! You have a link to a picture and audio file hosted on the web.  Congratulations.  Now you can share what your students created!

Here’s the Postcard FM interface.

It really is that easy.

The biggest concern most teachers will have right off the bat is the e-mail.  That is to say, not wanting to use a student e-mail or your own, since the e-mail used appears at the top of the “postcard” that’s produced.  Postcard.FM’s terms of service prohibit making a false identify, which is what you’d be doing if you entered an imaginary e-mail.   I e-mailed Postcard.FM’s support folks, and in their response they said they were really trying to prevent spammers from abusing the service.  The solution would be to have your tech folks add “students@myschool.org” (just fill in your school name) as a valid e-mail that you monitor, or to get a free web-based e-mail–such as Gmail–to use just for this purpose.

Postcard.FM would be great for a fast student project.  Since the interface is so simple and streamlined, even young kids and less-technically-inclined grown-ups are going to be able to do this, since it requires only the ability to browse for and locate a file.  The most difficult part of the process will be making the mp3 file to upload, but with a free download called Audacity (for us Windows people) and a desktop microphone, you’ll be all set.  (Mac computer people have iLife and so don’t get to complain about making mp3’s.)

The uses are unlimited–use a copyright-friendly historical photo and have kids record commentary about that period in history.  Have a child draw a picture and tell the story.  Use the postcards to greet students or staff who are recovering from illness at home.  Make a monthly or weekly series of postcards and you have the world’s easiest “radio show.”

Here’s my postcard!

There’s been plenty written on the value of letting students explore the Web on their own, rather than being sternly directed to one site. How are they going to learn how to identify and evaluate online sources if they never find any on their own? The searches that FAIL are often as useful as the searches that are successful, in terms of what the kids learn about the search process. A perfect example: a couple of years ago, I had a group of third graders in the computer lab, learning about the people of Africa. One group was learning about the Masai, another group the San, another group the Ashanti. A smartypants in the Ashanti group decided to jump out of our subscription database and see what they could find using Google. They found not quite the information they’d anticipated.  (A nice plug for subscription databases!)

I think this little incident shows that, in the elementary grades at least, there is something to be said for the guided search.  That’s when creating your own custom search engine comes in handy. My favorite “roll your own” search engine is Rollyo, though I’ve dabbled with Google Custom Search, too. Basically, both sites work the same way. You give your engine a name, and identify which specific websites you want your search engine to search. When you click “Create,” you will be given a link to a page where you can try out your search engine. If you like what you see, you can share the link or even embed it on your own web pages by copying and pasting some HTML.  You can see the Rollyo search I created for our urban wildlife unit here.

There are excellent reasons to use Rollyo or Google Custom Search. You can create a search engine for your own website–very useful, if you’ve made a page from scratch.  If students will be essentially repeating the exact same search on five or six different sites, create a custom search engine and let them do the search once. Librarians might want to create a lesson plan search engine for teachers, or a wildlife search engine for their students. It’s also a way to let young students experience some web searching, while restricting them to sites that are safe.

Rollyo is not perfect–the Rollyo site needs a link for “Help!”  (I searched for 15 minutes, trying to figure out how to change the image on my profile.)  There are also some “sponsored links” (which is WebSpeak for “advertisements”) at the top of the page, that kids will have to be instructed to ignore, though they are pretty clearly separated from the rest of the results page.  Rollyo’s contact form is broken at the moment, and I could not locate any other contact information.  Sometimes, mysteriously, one of the customized Rollyo engines I created returned all the results from the websites I linked by site, not by relevance–meaning if I searched for “elephant,” I got every single mention of “elephant” from Enchanted Learning, including “elephant shrew” and a circus page, before a better result from BioKids.  All in all, though, I think it’s a good product.  And it’s free, to boot!

Here are some more customized search engines:

–A search engine on the issue of bullying

–A search engine on early literacy

–A junior high search engine on the Civil War

My friend Jody has this theory that you should never buy a new car. For one thing, buying a used one is so much nicer to the planet–why let one more car rust in a junkyard? But she also makes the point that it’s nicer to get behind the wheel of a car that you know has been driven successfully, and all the bugs shaken out.

Web apps are kind of like that. I tried a site called Glogster a few months ago, and was really hooked. The site has only gotten better and more educator-friendly over time. Glogster lets you make a “glog,”–think of it as a poster that you build online. Just imagine that old posterboard science fair tri-fold, now with all kinds of multimedia build right in! You can include pictures, video clips, audio, music, and text. There’s an extensive file of clipart and animated goodies free for the using, too. Glogster accounts are completely free.

It appears to me that the original target audience was teenagers, who jumped right on the social aspect of the site–you can comment on other people’s creations, invite them to be your friends, and send little messages about everybody’s latest work. However, the potential for educational use is huge: it can be used to build interactive web pages without the least knowledge of HTML; to feature a student project, as a student news website…and lots more. You can also make a glog and embed it in your own webpage, as you would a TeacherTube video.

If you have ever located a file on your computer, you’ll find Glogster easy. You can even try building one without registering. Click on the kind of element you would like to add, such as text, audio, or graphics, and follow the prompts to choose from Glogster’s library or to upload your own images and sounds. Click on any element to select it, change it, or delete it.

Here’s an example. Click on the little arrow on the “TV screen” to play the video portion.

I will confess that I had to look at the HTML code and change the “width” and the “height” figures in order to fit into my edublogs page, but that was an easy fix–I changed the height and width to something around 400, to fit into a blog post. Most of the time, the easiest thing to do is just provide a link to the whole page.

The site is not without problems–some school districts may look askance at the social aspects–friends lists, commenting, etc., and also at some of the graphics. Browsing the site, you can see one heck of a lot of copyright issues. Making glogs with kids would be an excellent opportunity for some brushing up on citations, copyright, and fair use. (Bring on those ALA 21st Century skills!) In an e-mail exchange with a friendly Glogster rep, he commented that Glogster was considering some educator features. We’ll see soon what progress they’ve made.

Here’s a glog (I know, the word is SO strange…just keep thinking “poster” or “interactive webpage!”) for professional development Here’s an interactive glog for kids, embedded in a PBwiki page. And a glog made by a seventh grader as a student project.