Green Screen Magic

Keynote+iMovie=Green Screen Magic!

This week I set up rotational stations for my students to experiment with various green elements to use as green screen props. We experimented with green and blue food coloring in water, green play dough, green magnetic letters, green blocks, and green paper. I had each station set up for 4 people and when the bell rings, they switch to another station. The goal for this was to play with the features to see how they worked and then talk about ways we could use these tools in deepening our learning for different content areas.

The green screen is an integral part of the special effects process known formally as chromakey. … Chromakeying, also known as color keying, is the process of singling out one color in an electronic image and then using software (iMovie and iPad) to make that color transparent.

Here’s a video with a few examples (green marker, green food coloring, and green paper)

iMovie is the magical tool you need to achieve any green screen videos! The important part is making sure you have great lighting and no other random green objects in the movie frame itself. Also, no green clothing unless you want that to be intentional. Students will need to create a bottom layer (this is the layer that will show through the green) and then create a video layer on top. At the end of this post, I will also show you how to line up photos and videos by using Keynote to achieve the perfect balance and alignment.

How to achieve the human body effect:

Draw or find a free-to-use human body online. Save the picture to your Photos.

Capture video of a person holding a green piece of construction paper (make sure lighting is good) and have them slowly move the construction paper down the body and back up again.

Open Keynote and select a wide screen slide. (I prefer to use Split Screen so I can quickly drag images back and forth). Insert both the video and the photo on the same slide.

Change the opacity of the video and line up the photo so that the proportions of the body align. Once they align, you can delete the video.

Drag the slide thumbnail over to Photos app and now you have your bottom layer ready to go to align with your video!

Open iMovie

Add the photo as the bottom layer and disable Ken Burns.

Add the video and insert as a green/blue screen overlay.

Tap the green part of the video…your video should be in perfect alignment!

Happy creating! There’s so many ideas in bringing learning to life with green screens!

Keynote+GarageBand=Love

Keynote for iPad has become even more than I have ever dreamt it would be. Add in the animated drawings and new exporting features, Keynote has become a creator’s perfect tool.  When students create projects, they can create their own audio soundtrack in GarageBand and import it into Keynote. That’s why this post is all about how Keynote+GarageBand=LOVE!

Originally, I was going to use Keynote and Clips (which I LOVE, btw) to create this project, but in the end it just wasn’t the right tool. It’s a great reminder that when we use technology, it’s ALWAYS about finding the right TOOL for the right PROJECT. I didn’t need a movie editor for students to complete this project, they could do it all in Keynote+ GarageBand.

In this example, a student interprets a quote that resonates with him as he reflects on a time he’s been studying in history class.  I got the idea of students interpreting a famous quote in history from Apple’s Everyone Can Create curriculum, an amazing resource for teachers and students. I wanted to take it further and I love it when we can combine apps to create something really wonderful, which allows students to share their work in creative ways.

Project Workflow:

• Create a soundtrack in GarageBand with vocals, live loops, or other instruments.
• Share file and export as a song, save it to Files app.
• Open Files app, find the GarageBand song, tap to copy.
• Open Keynote and draw the person who spoke the famous quote in history.  Add the line draw animation and adjust the timing of delivery as needed. Add the text of the quote. Add animation to the text and adjust the timing so that it matches with the quote as it’s being read in the soundtrack (I like the typewriter animation for animating text).
• Tap on the slide to paste the GarageBand song and tap on it to adjust the delivery options.
• Play your move to make sure all of the timings are correct and all of the delivery options are in the right order.
• Export
• Share!!

Project Example:

An AMAZING iPad Tech Tip!

I hope this tech tip makes you as happy as it made me! A huge shout out to my new ADE friend from Australia, Deon, for teaching me this gem! It’s AWESOME!

Click HERE to see the video, which features this great iPad tip!

Hope you find it helpful! Cheers!

 

 

 

My Top 4 Updates to iWork for iPad

I am like a kid in a candy store reading about all of the new features just released by Apple to iWork for iPad. I couldn’t wait to share them with you so that you could get busy playing with the newest features and creating awesome content for your students when they return back to school. I am happy to share with you my Top 4 iWork updates.

 

1. Insert recorded audio to slides, documents, and spreadsheets:

You can now add recorded audio to slides, documents, and spreadsheets. This is a game changer…Keynote slides can become books, portfolios, and enhanced presentations with the added feature of audio. Think about how this would impact students being able to create full movies right in Keynote (especially with the new exporting features…scroll down to read more). Pages documents and books now have the added feature of recorded audio. Spreadsheets come to life even more with the addition of audio. Teachers can send out assignments with a recorded narration button to explain in greater depth what requirements are for an assignment. The possibilities of how this will impact our students are going to be amazing!

2. New shapes, advanced fills to shapes and drawings, and image galleries:

You can now add custom gradient fills as well as image fills to any shape. SCORE! There are even more shapes to add to the already large library of shapes. This allows students and teachers alike to create professional looking presentations, movies, posters, spreadsheets, documents, and other graphics. The addition of image galleries is a great feature for presentations and templates for students.

Fill options

Variety of ways to fill a shape. In this example, I put my two ADE buddies, Kelly and Wes, as the image fill with a color overlay.

Add an image gallery!!

3. Charts get a new look!

You can now change the look of your charts by rounding the corners…just a fun and contemporary update for columns and bars.

Change the look of bars and columns

4. My new ALL TIME favorite update: Exporting presentations in Keynote as movies or images!!

Long gone are the days where the only way you could save a slide in Keynote for iOS was to take a screen shot. Now, we can export slides as images or movies. This is a HUGE WIN for students, teachers, and other creatives! Students can create an entire book in Keynote complete with recorded audio and export as a movie. The possibilities for creativity and showcasing and sharing learning excites me so much! They can later import their movies into iMovie for sound effects, music, and other movie editing features. Being able to export Keynote slides in a variety of ways is going to change the ways students publish work.

 

With every update to iPad, my strong feelings supporting iPad in education increase. There’s nothing the iPad can’t do. Our students deserve to be able to interact with tools that give them a variety of options to showcase learning. The greatest part about these iWork updates: they are free! And as my great friend Jim says, “Free is in the budget.”

Have fun exploring these new updates and drop me a line to tell me how they are impacting what students are doing in your classroom!

 

 

3 Exciting Updates to Keynote for iPad

It was a surreal experience to be involved in the Apple announcement in Chicago last week. There were so many moments to write about and so many amazing updates to Apple technology (and implications for our learners) but for now I will share my three favorite updates to Keynote for iPad.

Exciting Keynote Update #1: Add drawings

As most of you know, Apple has a new iPad that is compatible with Apple Pencil. This truly is a game changer for education. The addition of drawing in Keynote is my favorite game changer EVER! The great news: you don’t have to have a pencil to draw…you can draw with your finger or another stylus if you have an older iPad. The implications for creativity are HUGE! Before, if you wanted to add a custom image you either had to create it in another app and use Instant Alpha to delete the background or you had to use the Draw with Pen feature in Keynote for Mac. Not anymore (picture a 40-year-old woman skipping with jazz hands and you’ll understand my excitement). Additionally, the power of the drawing tool is amazing! Lots of great features to play with, including changing the opacity, filling an image with color, custom colors, and a variety of drawing tools to make your drawings interesting. One of my favorites to the update is being able to pick my own colors to match a project that I am working on! Students can trace an image right in Keynote and match colors perfectly and there are no copyright infringements!

Don’t judge my drawings…but I used the color picker to pull color from an image I found online.

Exciting Keynote Update #2: Animate your drawings

So, yes, drawing on slides is awesome! So exciting! But wait…there’s more! You can animate your drawings! You can also animate each drawing as a separate object! There’s so much you can do here and I can’t wait to share more! This is just so exciting! Think about the possibilities this has for storytelling, showing work in math, experiments, and more! Here’s a sample drawing animation of a growing flower: https://vimeo.com/262884017

Think of the possibilities in animating a story as each drawing can be animated separately!

Exciting Keynote Update #3: Change slide size

My next favorite addition to Keynote is having the ability to change the size of the slides to fit screens with different aspect ratios! HOORAY!!!!! This is seriously just the best! When I wanted to do this before, I could only change the size of the slide on my Mac and then I could send it to my iPad. It’s little things like this that make my creative heart go pitter patter! Here’s a link to one of my favorite projects, where the size of the slide has to be portrait!

Click here to learn more about all the newest features in Keynote for iPad!

Name Equations in Keynote

This project collides literacy and math in a way that allows students to express themselves creatively. When you have combinations like that, a lesson is sure to be a success.

This project takes students down a powerful path in understanding a program such as Keynote (traditionally only thought of for presentations). Here are some of the skills they will learn in this fun project:

• Inserting text to create name (change font, size, color, and alignment)
• Learn to organize and space items appropriate for proportion of slide size
• Align text and shapes (spacing and sizing are important for this!)
• Search through the shapes library to find shapes that begin with the letters of their first name (phonics in action)
• Add up how many shapes are in each letter column
• Create an equation based on the number of shapes in each column
• Change the background color of a slide
• Export each slide as an image (Mac) or take a screen shot of slide in full screen (iPad)
• Share!

Ways to share student creations:

• Have each student upload their image to a Padlet wall.
• Each student uses Airdrop to drop their image to one iPad and that one iPad can combine all to create an iMovie or Clips video with all of the class images.
• Each student can create a checkthis.com site where they upload their image and write about what each one of the shapes represents. When students are finished, they can publish their site and share their URL with their friends and families!

Each child’s creation will be different and students will interpret the shapes in different ways. It’s important to note that some shapes have multiple meanings and can start with various lettters. For example, in the creative piece below, Austin uses a fork for the word utencil under the letter U.

 

Swift Playgrounds: Learn to Code 1 & 2 Vocab Cards

 

“Everyone should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”–Steve Jobs

Swift Playgrounds is an amazing app developed by Apple that can teach anyone the concepts of coding. The great part is that you don’t need any prior experience before diving in…I promise! 😀 As a teacher and professional development leader, I absolutely LOVE that Apple has given us many resources to be able to teach this to our students because it’s true…EVERYONE CAN CODE!

So…What is Swift?

Swift is a coding language meant to be easy to use so that anyone can learn coding and app development. Some of the world’s most popular apps were created in Swift.

So…What is Swift Playgrounds?

Swift Playgrounds is fun, engaging, and interactive. In Swift Playgrounds, students use real code to solve puzzles and interact with characters.  To explore more complex coding concepts, there are lots of challenges for which to build skills. Finally, students can make their codes come to life by programming robots and drones. Talk about cool!

Learn to Code 1 & 2 in Swift Playgrounds

Learn how to code in a fun 3D world with your new pal, Byte! At first, students will guide Byte through the 3D world and then they will move on to more advanced lessons. I love the teacher guides that come along with this because it lays out for you the lessons to teach coding concepts so there is a clear connection between real life and the code they use within the app. After all, coding is following a set of commands or instructions to accomplish a goal. In this case, it’s to get Byte through the 3D world.

Coding Vocabulary (aka: Coding Lingo) 😀

The vocabulary used to understand code can be tricky at first. I find it helpful to really have students learn the vocabulary so that they understand the concepts one needs to fully understand the code they are writing. This also allows students to build on each skill as they go through the lessons. I created vocabulary cards that go with the teacher guides for Learn to Code 1 & 2. Learn to Code 3 will be coming soon. I created these cards to print and display on the wall space in my room. Students can refer back to the vocabulary as they complete each lesson. Additionally, I created a Quizlet with the same vocabulary words for students to practice. I created these for my students and I thought yours would equally benefit! Hope they help you out! The only thing left is to get out there and get started!

Click Swift Playgrounds to download the vocabulary cards.

Click here for the Quizlet link.

Resources from Apple:

• To learn more about Swift, click here.
• Earn Your Swift Badges for Apple Teacher
• Download Swift Playgrounds here.
• Teacher Guides (great for bringing coding alive)
• iTunes U Courses (video lessons to get you started)
• Today at Apple

 

 

 

 

Become an Apple Teacher

In September, Apple Education announced its Apple Teacher Program, a program aimed at helping educators unlock the magic and potential of Mac, iPad, and apps in the classroom. Teachers sign up and learn new skills, test their knowledge, and earn badges to be ultimately recognized by Apple as an official “Apple Teacher.”

The best part about this program is that it is self-paced and teachers can participate while in their pajamas at home! Teachers can decide if they want to focus their learning for the Mac or the iPad and choose the path that works best for them. Once teachers complete a module, they will be given a quiz. No pressure if you don’t get the questions correct, as you can test again. The purpose of the test is so that educators can truly get the most out of these modules and the tests force you to master the concepts rather than skimming through.

THE BADGES

Once you earn a badge in each one of the categories and learn not only to use the app to get the best results, but you also learn how to infuse this into the classroom as a powerful teaching tool. Each module is full of ideas that relate to classroom content and help bring its use to life in meaningful ways teachers will appreciate. Click here to get started.

You will use your Apple ID to get started.

I am a huge supporter of this program.  Apple’s commitment to education is evident and I appreciate the way Apple continues to give teachers quality tools to enhance learning and teaching. My favorite tools as a creative professional will always Keynote and iMovie. I couldn’t live without those two apps and neither could my students. If you choose to accept the challenge of becoming an Apple Teacher, I promise you that you will learn something to take back to your classroom TOMORROW as a result and perhaps you will have a new favorite tool.

TEACHER RECOGNITION

Since I am the instructional technology teacher and leader of the technology program, I am encouraging teachers at my school to join the program and earn their badges. I put together some fun rewards to recognize the commitment and time teachers put aside to further their learning in this area. We are an Apple school and we have access to all of these applications and tools, so I can’t think of a better way for teachers to learn on their own time, and I do think they should be recognized for their commitment!

• Upon completion of the Apple Teacher program, teachers will earn a spot on the “Wall of Fame” located in the hallway of our school.
• Teachers will also receive a certificate showcasing their skills at this will be hung outside their classroom.
• Teachers will receive a “shout out” on our school Facebook page to congratulate them on their extended professional learning.
• Teachers will receive the official logo from Apple to use in their professional email signature.
• Most importantly, teachers will gain knowledge in unlocking the  potential with these great productivity and creative apps that are already on their iPad and Mac. These are the native apps and most people don’t realize the potential in these applications and how they can be used as tremendous tools in the classroom.

The “Wall of Fame” located in the hallway of our school.

Wall of Fame photo and school Facebook page recognition.

OTHER WAYS TO OFFER INCENTIVES

I have seen other schools and teachers provide a variety of incentives for teachers to earn their badges and expand their professional learning. Here’s two examples:

• http://bsd220tech.blogspot.com/2016/09/apple-teacher-professional-learning-for.html
• http://www.edtechyall.com/apple-teacher.html

Do you have another idea? Please share it! #AppleTeacher

 

Here’s the link for further information: http://www.apple.com/education/teachers/

 

Here’s the link to get started: https://appleteacher.apple.com/auth/#/signin/

Good luck and happy learning!

Build Beautiful and Engaging Online Assessments and Worksheets

I am probably late to the party on this one, as many of you might have already heard about this! Since I haven’t heard about it, I thought I would share with others who might be as surprised and delighted as I was! I love it when you stumble upon little gems!

So, this gem is called app.wizer.me and it is a site that allows teachers to build and design online quizzes, worksheets, and other material to test student’s knowledge or build a great review for them. What I loved most was the ability to add a variety of questions and tasks (open question, multiple choice, blanks, fill on an image, table, sorting, text, image, video) to reach all learners. I also loved that there was a “listen to instructions” button where you can record instructions or dictate questions. This is really great for formative and summative assessments and immediate feedback for students. Additionally, there is a teacher area that allows teachers to remix someone else’s quizzes/worksheets in a public gallery. This works well on computers, iPads, tablets, and Chromebooks. It works seamlessly with Google Classroom, too! It was super easy and I am already thinking about the possibilities in how I could use this in my classes. Here are the steps to get started:

1. Create an account. This was painless.
2. Begin building your document/worksheet
3. Select which type of question you want to add (a little similar to a Google Form)
4. Choose a design
5. When you are finished, give it a title, and choose how you want to distribute to students. Can share via Google Classroom, copy the link and share it, or have your students enter the pin code. Students will need to enter their first and last name and create a password that they will use each time they go to the site! I love that the students didn’t need an email address in order to use! HOORAY!
6. Loved the options of distribution…whenever there is a direct link, I do the happy dance.
7. Share with other teachers!
8. Boom! You’re done! I selected the option to allow my students to receive immediate feedback when they submit the assignment to see how they did. Then, you can review the work of your students and provide comments.

First step is adding a task. Look at all the cool options!

Lots of great design options!

Assign to students by sharing the link with them. They will go to a new screen that asks for their first and last name as well as a creation of a password.

You can also have students go to http://app.wizer.me/learn and type in the PIN code.

Gives students automatic feedback once they complete the tasks.

Hope you are able to use this with your students. A fun and easy way to ditch the paper tests and worksheets!

On the appwizer website, it states how long it takes to set up…(and it really is that easy)

• 5 minutes to set up and learn
• 20 seconds to assign via Google classroom, Edmodo, Moodle, or direct link
• Automatic grading
• 5 minutes to make your first worksheet
• 5 minutes to check grades and give personalized feedback

 

Parts of Speech iMovies

What a better way to demonstrate knowledge of a topic than by creating a video using iMovie! One of the great things about iMovie is the built-in trailers that kids can use to demonstrate or show their learning. I have kids create movie trailers to show their learning in all content areas and the result is always amazing. This time around, I had third graders showcase their knowledge of verbs, nouns, and adjectives. I have included a few of my favorites below. One thing that is very important to note is that I never allow my students to just take off with the iPad and begin taking pictures and videos for their projects. They must always do a rough draft where they complete an outline as well as the built in storyboard in iMovie. Additionally, this is also where they can decide what type of shot (video or still photo) they will add to their movie. A great resource that I love to share with others was created by Tony Vincent. He has created planning PDFs, which include fillable or printable templates for students as they plan their iMovie trailers. I love this resource and I use it all of the time! Once students have planned their trailers, then they get right to work in editing the text and adding photos and videos.

Verbs Can Be Fun! from April Requard on Vimeo.

 

Verbs are Everywhere from April Requard on Vimeo.

Scary Verbs from April Requard on Vimeo.

Nouns by Dylan and Landon from April Requard on Vimeo.

Nouns by Ahmed and Shayan from April Requard on Vimeo.

All Sorts of Verbs by Parishi and Asha from April Requard on Vimeo.

Verbs from April Requard on Vimeo.

Adjectives: Reese and Caitlin from April Requard on Vimeo.