TACCLE 2

Jott: Explore speech to text technology

jenhughes — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:34:12 +0000

www.jott.com

Jott is one of the coolest application of speech to text technologies we have seen. Once you sign up for a free account, call Jott on your phone and you can leave a message which will be converted to text and posted on your blog, twitter speed or to do list. The conversion is surprisingly accurate. In fact, we spoke this paragraph into jot and this is how is came out. (You can listen to the original message here.)

Singing Fingers

jenhughes — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:47:52 +0000

Finger Paint with Your Voice

Watch in HD: Youtube – Vimeo (watch or download mp4 in HD) – iPhone (Download m4v) – 720.mov High Quality (300 MB)

Singing Fingers Lets You Finger Paint with Sound
Make a sound while moving your finger to record a sound-drawing. Touch the drawing you just made to play the sound back: forward, backward, sideways, or any way. That’s it! Singing Fingers lets you see music, hear colors, and re-see everyday sounds for the beautiful playground that they are. Singing Fingers lowers the floor to let beginners play with sound as if it was finger paint, and raises the roof by letting advanced DJs break out of the grooves of the records into a world where sounds take any shape you give them. Your own fingers are like the needles that play the sounds back. Just like records and tape recorders were breakthroughs in simplicity and power, Singing Fingers has no complex buttons, menus, or rules. One simple medium, one simple touch of the finger, millions of possibilities.How it Works
While you drag your finger across the screen, your voice or any other sounds nearby are turned into colors on the musical canvas. The pitch of the sound is translated into a color, while the loudness of the sound determines the size. If you start on a blank white space you are recording. If you start on a colored space you are replaying. Use up to five fingers to play back many sounds at the same time, forwards, backwards or sideways.

Making Instruments, Telling Stories, Performing, Exploring, and Drawing Pictures
Tap the keys of a piano or sing a scale while dragging your finger on the screen, and you’ll have just drawn your first playable musical instrument. Tell a story while drawing the story on the screen. Explore a sound in the world, like rain or thunder, visually and see what it sounds like forwards and backwards. Use your voice as the “paint” to draw a picture. Laughter and yelling gives dozens of colors, while whistling a note can give you a specific color.

Cross-Sensory Creative Thinking
When you holler out and move your finger around on the screen, Singing Fingers turns the sounds into a concrete visual object. By transforming the pitch of the sound to a color and smearing it across the screen, people can learn to “see music” and “hear colors.” What is sometimes referred to as “synesthesia” or “cross sensory thinking” becomes an everyday part of playing with sounds. One of the goals of the people behind Singing Fingers is to help people to see the invisible and re-see the everyday world as the beautiful playground that life is.

The Next Evolution of Sound Recording and Remixing
A long time ago, only advanced technicians with handmade machines could record sounds. Exciting advancements like record players and tape recorders meant more people could play and record sounds, while cultural revolutions like scratching records and making summer mix tapes meant more people were mixing and remixing music. Computers have opened up many new ways to play with sounds, but none have been as huge a leap for people’s expressiveness as we would hope for: iPods let you play music, complex software lets you mix it together, and simple programs let you record sounds, but where is the big leap forward? We see Singing Fingers as a step toward the next big cultural transformation, putting all the power of recording, playing back, and remixing, literally at the tip of the finger for the most improvisational, fluid, sound interface we could come up with. Singing Fingers lowers the floor to let children play with sound as if it was finger paint, and raises the roof by letting advanced DJs break out of the grooves of the records into a world where sounds take any shape you give them and your fingers are like the needles that play the sounds back, with as fine control as your hand will allow. The scratching of records, the recording of tapes, the visualization of the graphics equalizer, and the remixing power of computers, in one little app that takes seconds to learn and years to master.

Interface Simplicity
Just like record players and tape recorders were simple and powerful new ways to work with sounds, Singing Fingers simply gives you a blank page. To manipulate sounds you only need your fingers to smear them onto the page and to play them back. No complex buttons, menus, or rules. In fact, to record, play back, and remix sounds there are zero buttons or menus (the buttons are only for file manipulation: saving, loading, and getting a new one). One simple medium, one simple touch of the finger, millions of possibilities.

The Future (Version 1.0)

www.flickr.com

What is this?

To hear about future releases sign up for the low volume announcement email list by sending an email to with the word LIST in the subject. Singing Fingers was designed for the iPad, but also works with the iPhone. The iPad BETA version will be released any day now. We’re excited about the basic design, but there are lots of features we want to add, which is why we consider the current release to be a BETA release. Here are the features we are thinking we want to add before releasing version 1.0: Looping and automation, recording and sharing, sound tweaks and other glitch fixes. We have also received suggestions, which we take seriously, like adding a toolbar to modify sound-objects and delete or move existing sound-objects. Please keep the suggestions coming.

Tips & How To
You can just go ahead and use Singing Fingers without any detailed instruction. But if you get stuck, or just want to fine tune your expertise, see this small list of tips.

About Us
This product was created at MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten, where we believe that people learn most creatively by working on making things and expressing themselves in a purposeful context related to their own passions and interests. The passions of the inventors who made Singing Fingers have truly fused into one with this tool more so than in any of their other collaborations. Eric Rosenbaum works on tools for improvising, and Jay Silver works on tools that help people see the invisible. Singing Fingers really is about both. Together, Eric and Jay form the artist collective Beginner’s Mindand have created other creative tools like Drawdio and GlowDoodle. Contact us at:

Taccle2 site Spring clean

jenhughes — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:59:00 +0000

Today we are going to be playing around with the back end of the Taccle2 site. Thanks to all you teachers out there, the website is groaning under the weight of all the e-learning ideas you have posted and is in need of some serious housekeeping. We are going to tidy up the menu structure so that it will be easier to navigate, reorganise the front page a bit, take off some widgets and plug-ins that are not earning their keep and basically have a spring clean-up. The site should work fine as this is going on but if you find some unexpected things happening today, that’s just the workmen ! Actually – if anyone is on line right now and wants to feed us some suggestions – go for it! Tell us what you’d like in the comment box under this post

Teacher Safety Online

nic daniels — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:42:26 +0000

Mr Peters’ secret was out and he knew that the pupils weren’t going to make life easy for him.

One of the questions we get asked most by teachers is regarding internet safety and using social media responsibly. Of course, no teacher wants students to see pictures of him the worse for wear after a night down the pub (#awkward), swanning around on Tenerife in a mankini (we’re not judging) or Morris Dancing (now we are judging).

The General Teaching Council of Wales have published a set of hints and tips to help teachers stay safe. While not being a definitive list they are a good place to start. Numbers 4-17 are less obvious and definitely worth a look.

1. Adhere to school/local authority/government policies and guidelines

2. Adhere to the Teaching Council’s Professional Code of Conduct.

3. Make use of existing guidance about e-safety and the use of electronic / social media. As well as policies, procedures and guidelines referred to above, there is a lot of good advice available, for example from teacher unions.

4. Maintain a formal, courteous and professional tone with pupils and ensure that professional boundaries are maintained.

5. Do not exchange private phone number. email, text, photos with pupils*.

6. Decline pupil* initiated friend requests and do not instigate any. Use discretion with parents**.

7. Act online in a way that does not call into question your position as a professional.

8. Realise that pupils will be curious about your personal life.

9. Manage your privacy settings, especially for photos.

10. Ask others to remove any undesirable content about you from their pages.

11. Audit and re-evaluate information about you regularly.

12. Note that potential employers, pupils, parents and others may Google you.

13. Remember that online conversations may not be private, for example, a post on a forum.

14. Do not discuss pupils, parents or colleagues online or criticise your employer.

15. Use strong passwords and change them regularly.

16. Bring any concern you have to the attention of your employer.

17. Be mindful of how you present yourself online e.g. when writing a profile about yourself.

* This includes ex-pupils… even if you taught them many years ago.

** We would go so far as to say that you shouldn’t befriend parents online either; unless they were close friends before you taught their children.

Death to VLE!

jenhughes — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 20:19:46 +0000

Regular visitors to the Taccle2 website will know my personal opinions about VLE or LCMS or whatever the catch all generic name currently is for those behemoths they call “learning platforms” (such as Blackboard, Moodle and so on). I have ranted on several occasions about their shortcomings – in particular they way in which they spectacularly fail to engage students in learning whilst keeping the bureaucrats happy – because at least the ‘learning’ is filed away tidily and accessible in a logical way. That very few children or class teachers ever want to access it seems to have escaped the attention of a lot of IT departments. In fact, “moodle lessons” when children have to dutifully upload their work have become depressingly familiar. But there you go – the inspectors love it!

For a while, PLE (Personal Learning Environments) seemed to offer an alternative. However my passing flirtation with the PLE community never turned into a full-blown love affair chiefly because all the rhetoric and theory never seemed to answer the question ‘What does this look like in the average primary classroom?’ So I continued to moan but, in truth, never really got it together to come up with any solutions. So I was much heartened this morning when I read Ian Addison’s blog post ‘A VLE Alternative’ because he has actually provided some answers and has suggested a process for some collaborative work. Ian is definitely one of those people who, while I am muttering darkly, actually does things. His blog is always good, intensely practical and 100% written from the perspective of a primary teacher – I would strongly recommend signing up to it. However, with Ian’s permission, I am reproducing today’s in full because it’s pressing all the right buttons for me (not least because I am loving my new Chromebook!)

He says:

“**This isn’t all finished yet, but I’ve been asked to post my progress so far – it also gives chance for feedback!**

This post was started because many schools in Hampshire are looking for ways in which they can remove their VLE and use an alternative. So I thought I would put together a post based on the common tools within a VLE, particularly the one used in Hampshire, and then give some ideas of alternatives. Many of these alternatives will be Google Apps-based or blog-based, but there are also others too.

The main thing to remember is that choosing a variety of tools is going to take more work than buying a VLE with all of the tools built-in. However, the obvious benefit to using other tools will be cost. Many of the tools used will be free but there is the obvious cost of time in setting up some of these tools and configuring them to meet your needs. Over the coming weeks, these pages will get updated to include how-to guides and videos.

The plan is that this post will develop into something I can share with schools if they decide to drop their VLE and are looking for alternatives.

For help with blogging or Google Apps, feel free to contact me for further advice. To setup Google Apps yourself, use the guide here or just get an overview here.

Some common tasks and VLE tools:

Creating a topic or class webpage
Providing links to websites related to the topic
Uploading photos to share learning with a wider audience
Uploading photos for children to access and use within their work
Emailing and Messaging
Discussion Forums
Storage of work and documents – for ongoing storage, providing files for lessons and setting/receiving homework

If you have any tools that could be added to these pages, please let me know so that I can add them on.”

So watch this space and please contact Ian with your ideas!