How to disable related videos when embedding YouTube videos into your blog.
Hi friends,
Today I started work on my class blog, a place to curate learning objects that I find or make and consider useful tools or exemplars for the students' learning in my programme. This is in response to research I am currently working on for a literature review in my course with Mind Lab.
I started loading some videos from YouTube and noticed that after I played them on the front end of the blog (on visitor mode) the video would end on a selection of unrelated videos from YouTube, even if I am embedding them through the HTML mode. These videos are not always appropriate and not something you want to see on a website that you are creating for your school community, as you have no control over what is advertised next.
So after a quick search, I came across this tutorial that quickly helped me to solve that problem. It may help you too :)
Its 2 years old so the YouTube navigation has changed slightly but the steps are still the same.
Over the last 4 years I have organised an Art Options Day each year for our Year 4 team during our Inquiry - How We Express Ourselves.
The Central Idea: People use many different forms of
expression to convey their uniqueness as human beings.
Lines Of Inquiry (with
focus key concepts)
The diverse
ways in which artists express themselves (form).
How people
become artists (change).
How we can
express our uniqueness through the Arts (perspective).
This has always been one of my favourite Transdisciplinary Themes for IB, and this unit in particular. It has lead to the development of many of my art units available at TPT and TNB.
The organisation for Art Options Day always starts weeks earlier. I would implore the parent body to offer up their time and skills, for a day, to run 4 mini workshop of an hour each, for up to 8 students at a time. The 3 teachers in my planning team would also run workshops.
Usually we would end up with up to 12 options on offer, ranging from pebble painting to digital animation, flax weaving to carpentry. We have had some great workshops over the years. The kids get to rank their wish-list from 1-12 (1 being their first choice). Once all the wish-lists are in, I spend 2-3 days putting them into options and trying to ensure that they all got most of what they asked for. I also had to consider any unfavourable student combinations, brief parents, organise art resources and materials, book out work spaces around the school, oversee set up and pack up, and run my own workshops on the day. Phew!
This is a big job but a massive highlight for the students. One student told me last year that with each theme we worked through, he would think "that was my favourite inquiry", but each time, the next one would trump it! Yay :) Job done!
This resource cover was created by my very talented daughter when she was 12. She is now 18 and an artist in her own right. I just love this self-portrait! Her art can be Googled under JessLouiseArt.
In my first year I ran a workshop for - Build your own digital avatar - being the Digital Classroom teacher for the year group. Most of the material for that came from the inspirational Jacqui Sharp.
Then for 2 years I ran Van Gogh's Sunflowers (Which I am yet to write up into a lesson plan (watch this space), and for one year I ran a Digital Photography Workshop.
The Digital Photography was an interesting one because during the Art Day of the previous year, I had a parent (photographer) offer to run this workshop and he did - but with mixed results. The students had fun playing with manual settings but didn't come back with any usable photographs at the end of their hour. Mostly blurred or random shots.
So, after much research, I wrote up an Art Unit to ensure that the kiddies got the best aspect of this workshop. It was so successful that I have also since run it as a self exploratory unit for small groups within my own class on a weekly basis, for an eight week stint.
Each week they take an aspect of the unit and explore this in pairs. We used to pool the digital cameras from our team for this so that a group of 6 would be out on a photographic walk at a time.
Now a days, we can also use the iPads for most of it.
This 46 page resource covers 7 aspects of digital photography. Each aspect has two teacher lesson slides, then a student challenge, followed by student exemplars. Once you run this a couple of times, you can collect your own bank of student exemplars. The photos in this resource were mainly taken by students aged 8-9 but the unit can be leveled up or down.
You can get yourself a copy now from my TPT and TNB stores (links below).
2) Now enter the name you wish to appear in your signature - there is a limit of 25 characters.
3) In Step 2 - 5 you can select the font, size, colour and slope of your text. Leave the background transparent and click the text colour box to bring up the colour chart.
3) Once you get to this page...
...scroll down until you see this....
...and click on the last one - 'Want to use this signature'
4) You will be taken to this page where you select the HTML option.
5) You will be given 2 options - to generate the code for your signature, or to generate a combined code for signature and information as well. I chose the 2nd option as I wanted to include my social media links and stores with my signature. All fields are optional and I played around with them to fit in what I wanted. Its not perfect but will do for now.
6) The window beneath the fields will show a preview and the code will generate beneath that. Once you are happy, copy the code.
7) Head over to your blog and go to Settings - Post and comments, paste the code into the box beside Post Template. Save changes.
8) The next time you go to create a post, your signature will appear instantly on your page. You just add your post above it.
I liked this because I did not need a 3rd party site to create the code, however, I wish all my information could be links and also there is a character limit. If you know of a better, easier way, I would love to hear from you :)
The next time you have IT or eLearning wanderings, pay this website a visit. Great ideas, information and explanations for educators pushing the modern learning envelope. Highly recommended.
Welcome to the final installment in the Body Systems series of posts.
At the forefront of our minds in Year 6 is the upcoming exhibition of learning, next term. With that in mind, I let my students run with the presentations they chose to create for their body system, and give them presentation opportunities, in preparation for the 'Big One'.
First, we had to decide who we wished to share our explanation with (audience) - mum & dad, family overseas, another y6 class, another year level class, the www, etc.
Having decided this, it guided the choice of presentation option, for many students. Others chose an option because they wanted to try something new or they stuck with an 'old faithful' to alleviate some stress.
Next they met in presentation groups to set out criteria for their presentation option.
With the poster/ science board / brochure groups, we held a few tutorials around how to copy their edited paragraph into a Pages or Word documents, add colourful borders, select font styles and colours, emphasise titles and include images. Completed publishing was then loaded up into the class Google Drive (see earlier posts in this series), into the Please Print folder for me.
The website and slideshow groups had tutorials around composition, digital headers like flamingtext and gathering & inserting images, with credits.
Those that made movies needed support about how to look at the camera, while reading from a tele-prompter on the screen & how to add in the images and bibliography.
Here are a few examples that have been shared to the class so far:
1) First up - some students chose to work on slideshow presentations. This students created his Keynote slideshow about the Urinary system. Here it is converted into Quicktime. Love the news intro music :)
2) Next - some students chose the movie / video-ed speech option. Here we have a movie about the Integumentary System made with Windows Live Movie Maker and converted to Quicktime. Other students used iMovie or recorded their show with a digital still camera on the record option.
3) Many students seemed taken by my interest in 'foldables' this year and went with either a Science Board, or made their own foldable from large sheets of card I found in the Art Resource Cupboard. This Science Board is about the Immune System:
4) This next student shared her information as a laminated mobile. Earlier in the week, our planning teams had enjoyed the opportunity of visiting another local IB school. I had taken some photos in their y6 classrooms which I had shared with my students and voila! Here we have someone trying a new idea - Risk Taker - yay! It is 5 cards high, double sided with images, and hangs from the ceiling. We laminated it and punched holes in the centre (top and bottom). She then joined them up with ribbon and I pinned it to the ceiling.
5)This group of boys created a website to share their information. You will need to click on the link below the image to be taken to it. I love the principle behind this one because I had taught 1 of the boys 2 years ago in y4. Back then I was a digital classroom teacher so pushing that idea to the max, my 8-9 year olds presented their learning around Natural Disasters using Weebly. Now in y6, the apprentice became the expert, and taught the other 2 the ins-and-outs. All I did here was create the domain for them as its in my teacher account. Click HERE for the link. Navigate through the site by clicking the tabs along the top and scrolling down each page.
I hope that gives you and your students some ideas for your next round of learning presentations. Even though we had moved onto our new inquiry around Energy, they continued with this during their literacy time as it formed part of their visual language. Presenting to the class addressed Oral language, as well. Some students reflected on what its like being in the audience listening to presentations and started to include quizzes and elements of surprise into theirs (independently), to ensure that the audience was engaged. It was well worth the time as so much learning came out of it, including time management.
Finally, I'll leave you with the following two freebies:
1) This is the audience reflection sheet that the class came up with. Students in pairs filled out one of these after each person presented, as did I. These were then collated and given to the presenter for reflection. Click on the image to get your copy
2) This is the assessment we compiled to check for multi-level understanding of the Central Idea (The human body is made up of complex, interconnected systems).
Know / Remember / Apply. Very revealing indeed. Click on the image to download your copy.
I have compiled all my resource, activities, links, teacher and student sheets for this unit in a 130 pg resource that you can purchase at one of the following venues. Hope you have as much fun as we did. Click on the thumbnail below to access the store.
Happy teaching and report writing to my fellow New Zealand teachers and wishing my international friends a fabulous and well-earned summer break :)
In post #7 I said I would write about how we use our class Google Drive for collaboration and moderation. This is something I started using last term, when our school server "died'. I wanted some way that students could write on-line and access for collaboration and moderation. Enter our class Google account.
Now there are probably snazzier ways that people are using the
internet for this purpose but as a starting point, this was perfect for me and
my Y4 kiddies last year. This Year I am repeating it with my Y6's and
so far so good. The only difference of course is that last year we were a
digital class (12 iMacs- 1:2) and this year we are 1:3 with variable
devices (iMac, windows laptops, iPads).
P.S. I still like to think that we are a digital class because its about mindset really, not the hardware you have.
Anyhow...this is how we did it:
Step 1) Open a Google account
for the class. Make it something generic that can move with you if you
should change rooms or levels.
Step 2) Make the password something relevant to you and your students.
Step 3) Agree on a set of user etiquette with your students on the appropriate use of this shared drive.
Step 4) Create folders as required and teach your students a few basics, they'll soon figure out the rest.
Home Folders: I created a class 2013 HOME folder first and tasked each student to log in, open the Home folder and create their own Home folder inside this one. They had to name their personal folders as follows:
e.g. name_home2013, and finally assign a colour to it.
This is where they file away completed or personal work.
Work Folders: next I created a folder for our current theme - Who we
are-Body Systems. Within that there are 3 folders - draft (red), peer
review(orange) and teacher chat(green). As students prepare to type up a
paragraph from their research notes, they create a new document each
time. Again the naming convention is important: e.g.
name_1_intro, name_2_heart. This way its clear to see at a glance whether a student is keeping up with the pace, or needs a little extra support.
Once they are happy with their paragraph, they move it to the peer
review folder. They then set up appointments with other kiddies (also in that
orange folder) for a peer review. I require them to have 3 collaborative
sessions, before posting into the teacher chat folder.
As work appears
here, I call students for a teacher conference about their paragraph. Following this the final work is filed into the group folder for that body system. Once the work has been used in the presentation, it is filed away in the student's Home folder.
Teacher Chat: I copy and paste the student's work below in the same document. I work with or without the student in the copy only, leaving the original work untouched. Great thing is that I can easily access this drive from anywhere, even my iPhone and edit work if we are backed up.
Notice the Peer Reviewers names below the student's paragraph.
I have a marking code that I use as follows. This document also sits
inside our drive for reference. The student then pastes a 3rd copy
beneath mine and makes the edits suggested. This way there is a very
clear trail of evidence to show progress. They can use this to talk to
when sharing their learning at parent evenings
Here are our rules for using the drive:
And here are the process steps that we had for reference:
Once all the editing is completed, then comes the fun part of creating a presentation, the brain can switch fully into creative mode as it no longer needs to worry about elements of handwriting, accurate copying, spelling, etc.
I'll post about the presentation options next term when we get to that, lots of hard work researching, writing and editing first - haha :D
Would love to hear about how you use Google Drive with your kiddies.
'Til next time :)
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