The Playground and Blabberize

"The Playground" is the story of Rosa, a young black girl who will be the first to integrate the previously all-white Oranje Primary School after the end of apartheid in South Africa. The story explores her thoughts and feelings prior to and on her first day of integration. It also introduces other significant characters: her mother (Mama), the son of her mother's employer (Hennie), and "Trigger Boy," a white boy at Oranje Primary School.

I decided to explore characters and their feelings and motivations for this particular assignment. To facilitate this exploration, I selected Blabberize as my web 2.0 tool. Blabberize allows you to upload a picture of your choosing and then add recorded sound to give the picture a "voice." You also define the mouth to create the animation of the picture actually talking.

Here's my interpretation of Rosa at the start of the story, as she's looking ahead to her experience at Oranje Primary:

Photo credit: vagawi (Flickr)

You can also view this by following this URL: http://blabberize.com/view/id/238785.

There are many applications of this tool as a means to study a character. A teacher might assign characters from a novel and ask students to write a narrative and then use the tool to create animated versions of the characters to share with the class or display on a web page or blog. One student might create several animated photos of the same character to reflect changing feelings and attitudes over the course of a story. Or a student might select two opposing characters (foils) and create animated photos as a variation of the standard compare/contrast assignment.

One of the most intriguing possibilities for Blabberize, in my opinion, is the ability to give voice to lesser characters or those who lack a voice within a text. It could be used to retell a story from a different point of view (similar to the True Story of the Three Little Pigs that we read earlier in the quarter) or to explore the impacts of gender and/or ethnicity on a particular tale.

Now for some technical considerations. Using the tool was free; saving the image required the creation of a free account (which could be done by the teacher). The user first must upload a photo stored on his or her own computer, which adds a level of complexity to the assignment. Teachers could use this opportunity to teach and practice web searching skills and copyright awareness, or simply require students to search within the Creative Commons. Or teachers might preselect a variety of images and allow students to choose from the smaller set. While this is definitely a timesaver, I feel that image selection is important as it forces students to visualize their character and look for an image that fits their understanding.

The second step is to define the mouth area, using a free form shape that can be enlarged, shrunk, or otherwise modified to fit the picture. (I didn't do mine correctly the first time - I selected her entire mouth instead of just the lower portion - and had to go back and redo it after previewing the image with the audio.) It is also helpful if the image has a clear view of the mouth, which facilitates the selection of the correct area in this step.

Finally, the user must record audio. I recommend preparing a script first, so that students can practice and have a coherent recording the first time. You may use a pre-recorded message that you've saved, record using a microphone, or record by calling in from your phone. I used the phone option and found it very easy to use. You are given a phone number and PIN, and it's not any more difficult than setting up a voicemail greeting.

From there, it's one quick save to generate the final product. You can edit as needed, or save and share via a web link or by embedding in a page. You also can make your product private, or mark it as mature as needed.

While the finished product is kind of goofy and silly at first glance, I think students would really enjoy using this tool. Based on the technical requirements, I'd use this with students in fifth grade and up.

The Gun and Fodey

"The Gun" is the story of Esi, a black boy who lives with his family on a white (Afrikaaner) owned farm near the homeland of Mapoteng. Esi's father and mother oversee the farm for "Boss" Mackay, the director of a mining company in Johannesburg. As Esi grows up, he witnesses police raids and becomes frustrated with both the apartheid system and his father's role in preserving the status quo. While out in the bush hunting with Mackay's future son-in-law, Williams, Esi makes a choice that will change his life forever.

For this story, I chose to focus on the reading comprehension strategy of summarizing. Students often have difficulty with this skill and want to include every single detail from a story or passage in their summary, rather than focusing on the main points. Teachers need to explicitly teach and model the skill, and provide many opportunities for guided and independent practice. One excellent activity for developing the ability to summarize is writing newspaper articles.

I chose to use a newspaper clip generator from the web site Fodey. The tool is very simple to use - enter the name of the newspaper, title, date, and article, and click generate. The resulting picture can be downloaded, saved on a computer, and embedded in a web site or blog, like this:

As with any tool, I see both pros and cons to using Fodey with students. On a positive note, the tool is quite simple and easy to use. I wouldn't anticipate upper elementary or middle school students having any trouble with it. It also generates a very realistic looking newspaper clip, which can be motivating for students. It also generates the clip as a picture (jpg file) which is a standard file format that works with blogs, web sites, and even word processing or presentation software.

However, there are cons to the tool as well. One of them is that Fodey does not provide an option of storing the work in an online gallery, which means that teachers who wish to share or showcase student work on the web must have another site on which to do so. The generator also cut my text slightly when I first generated the clip, so I went back and shortened my article. This would mean that students would be limited to short compositions - and potential limit the use for short stories or articles as opposed to novels. Even with these limitations, however, I still see value in using a tool like Fodey with students as they learn to summarize text.

The Typewriter and Prezi

"The Typewriter" follows the story of Nandi, an eleven-year old girl in Soweto in the wake of the June 16, 1976 Soweto uprising. Even though she sneaks out to join the older children in a demonstration at the funeral of a peer killed in the riots, she doesn't quite understand what is going on around her. She finds herself in a dangerous position when her cousin, Esther, needs help in hiding a typewriter - used to create leaflets supporting the student protests and a symbol of the resistance movement - from the police.

Because this story relies so heavily on actual historical events, I decided to create a timeline as a sample project. This is a good example of a pre-reading activity that students could engage in to help them better understand the context of the story. Each student could research the history of education in apartheid South Africa and create their own timeline to demonstrate understanding, or a teacher might consider making the timeline a collaborative assignment for small groups or even the class as a whole. I created my timeline using Prezi, an online presentation tool, and embedded images and video to supplement the text.

I had trouble embedding this into the blog, so you can view my timeline within the context of the Prezi web site.

While I love using Prezi as a presentation tool, it was not my first choice for this particular project. I first tried to create the timeline using xtimeline, a free tool for creating web-based timelines. However, the site was running so slowly that I gave up after waiting 20+ minutes to add my first event. I don't know if the site always runs that slowly (although it has both times I tried to use it), but it was a prohibitive feature in my opinion.

I decided that Prezi would work well as a "plan B" given the ability to create a path from event to event within the presentation. The only downside that I can see to using Prezi as a timeline creator is that you lose some of the ability to view the timeline in its entirety as with traditional timelines. It is possible to zoom out to see all of your entries while working in Prezi, but the words become impossible to read. I do like that the tool allows you to upload images and video to include. As I hope you'll agree, in this case the media really enhance the educational value of the timeline.

Of course, teachers could also have students create timelines of the events in the story itself, or they could add the events to the historical timeline, blending fact and fiction in the process. Those would become more a during-reading or post-reading assignment, and I wanted to focus on the activity during the pre-reading phase.

This particular project also demonstrates the importance of testing the web 2.o tools out before giving students an assignment. If I had taken a class of middle school students to the computer lab and asked them to work using xtimeline, my entire lesson plan (and possibly classroom management) could have been derailed if the site continued to not work. Teachers should also consider whether having 30+ students on a site at the same time will impact the speed at which students are able to work. It's a good lesson for all of us!