Mr. Casal has left the building...

To the PS 10 community,

It is with a heavy heart I am posting this blog entry. I will no longer be working at PS 10, effective immediately. I have been presented with an opportunity outside of New York City and have chosen to pursue it.

I realize this is sudden, and brings about unforeseen difficulties as the school year begins, and for this I sincerely apologize. This was in no way my intention. I was not looking to leave 10, but I was approached out of the blue and offered an opportunity in Westchester, in the Scarsdale school district, that I needed to accept.

In the last 5 years I have immensely enjoyed my time at 10. Even if I may not be the touchy-feely smiley type, I was always having fun. Thank you to everyone for the wealth of experiences and all that I have learned. This was not an easy decision and I leave PS 10, and all my students, with a heavy heart but a need to pursue this opportunity beyond the DOE.

I hope I have imparted some skills and knowledge that my students, and the parents of my students, find valuable. My hope is for my students to pick up where we have left off and begin to use the Google Apps platform we have implemented to drive their own learning. We’ve researched, created presentations, built websites, have tweeted, and have blogged. Just because I am not here does not mean this has to end.

I truly hope my students continue to pursue the interests and projects we have begun, and take this opportunity to pursue others we haven’t thought about yet.

Keep blogging, tweeting, building portfolio webpages, Skyping, and pushing the limits of Google Apps. Please reach out to me at any point for any technical assistance and I will do my best to support the students of PS 10 as best I can from afar.

Students of PS 10, you have done amazing things and you have the skills and knowledge to continue to do amazing things. Push the limits, expand the boundaries. Have a vision. Be demanding. Create. Plant a positive digital footprint. Be awesome.

Thank you for a great 5 years. See you on teh interwebs…

• Email: mrcasal.lab@gmail.com
• Twitter: @mr_casal
• Google+: +ChrisCasal
• Facebook: MrCasal.lab
• LinkedIn: Christopher Casal
• Graphite: MrCasal
• Personal blog: thecasalos.blogspot.com 

5th Graders - Take your @ps10.org data with you

5th graders,

Over the last few years you have created quite a lot content here at PS 10. Between your classroom and the computer lab you have produced a lot of great work.

In the last year everyone has been using Google Drive to create and store projects.

Here is how you take it all with you:

3rd Grade Google Presentations

3rd graders have been working on creating Google Presentations in Drive.

The theme, and title, is "What History Means to Me" which is essentially an extension of a previously written essay created as a Google Document.

The original Document was an introduction to using Google Drive; comparing and contrasting to Microsoft Word, and so forth. The actual writing was fairly self directed. I gave students a prompt: "to me history means..." and then it was up to them to define "history." For some students history is all about family. For others it is all about learning in school. History is the past, but the aspects of the past that stand out for each student vary child to child.

Once the essay was finished I introduced them to Presentations. We talked about slides as opposed to paragraphs, bullet points as opposed to sentences, the different style and voice used to convey the same content. They then began to turn their "History" documents into Presentations, able to edit, update, and alter in any way they saw fit.

The overall project is a few months in the making because we cover:

Class 460's PowerPoint movies

Ms. Smith-Thomas's class has been working on creating PowerPoint presentations.

We started with the basics of Powerpoint such as adding slides and text. WE discussed what a bullet point is, how to edit and revise bullets to make them clear and concise, and how to add create appropriate and relevant content.

Once the slides were done students looked to relevant and appropriate pictures using Google to add to their presentations.

Once all the elements were in (titles, bullets, pictures) students added Animations to all the elements.

After animations students added Transitions to all the slides, set with timings, so the slides would advance automatically after the viewer read the information.

Once everything was complete, students would watch each other's presentations to provide feedback and help each other with any final editing and revising.

When they were ready to turn in, students did a "Save as Movie" to turn the presentations into .mov files.
(side note - unfortunately when saving out as a movie the animations, transitions, and timings don't carry over, so not all elements are readily available via YouTube - we'll be addeing PowerPoint shows to this page shortly to showcase the full compliment of student work)

They they used the class DropItTo.me site to upload it to Mr. Casal's Dropbox. From there Mr. Casal added them to his ps10.org YouTube channel and embedded them here...

Enjoy!
(4 students are finished and currently posted. these 4 studies are in the process of assisting the other 7 in completing, exporting, and uploading their movies)

Joseph's:

Dylan's:

Isabela's:

Anthony's:

Giovanni O:

More to come soon...!

Adobe Voice - a quick iPad app review

Adobe recently released a new app, Adobe Voice.

It's subtitle is "Show your story."

And it's just that simple. Choose your photos. Record your audio story to match. Save. Publish. Share. Very simple, but very elegant and powerful at the same time.

Here is my first attempt at using the app...

(raw link: http://voice.adobe.com/v/CM95Zzdayhr)

That video took me about 3 minutes, literally, to make.

While Adobe Voice may lack in heavy editing features it is fantastic for putting together quick videos from your photo roll.

The upside?

• easy to use
• Insert Text
• Import Camera Roll photos
• Keyword search for clip-art style Icons
• Creative Commons-licensed
• 32 Themes 
• various colors and textures for backgrounds
• 6 Layout templates
• photos only, photos and captions, two-column, etc
• 30+ Music options 
• 37 built in, but the app can also pull songs from your iPad's iTunes Library

The downsides? 

• Can't export the finished product to the Camera Roll (or another app)
• Only uploads to Adobe's site (can't add to YouTube, Vimeo, etc)
• Need an Adobe Creative Cloud account (free, but yet another account to manage)
• Their embed code seems to be a bit wonky, and maybe it's more Adobe's hosting, but it seems to take an abnormally long time to load

The downsides aside, I think Adobe Voice has great potential.

• Its very easy to use
• Makes quality multi-media presentations quickly
• Easy for student and teachers alike to do exactly what Adobe set out it, tell their own story

It's free. Free to download. Free to store on Adobe's Creative Cloud...

Definitely worth the download at that prince. Here is the App Store link: Adobe Voice


Tell your story...

Things happen pretty quickly in schools, Adobe Voice is a great way to snap some photos to document what you are doing, add some brief descriptive narration, and easily share to your students, parent, or community at large.

I'm looking forward to playing around with it some more, really seeing how creative and detailed the final products can be. 

Going to put it in some student hands too, let them really take it for a spin...

Why Blogger with students?

I use Blogger with my students. I have two classes currently running fully independent blogs. One 3rd grade class and one 5th grade class.

I often get asked why I chose Blogger over some of the other blogging platforms, namely Kidblog, EduBlogs, or even WordPress.

My choice was based on the following thoughts:

• we are a Google Apps (GAFE) school so Blogger was an easy choice
•  to keeps login simple
• seamlessly integrates with other apps we use such as Drive
• this class blog (ps10tech.blogspot.com), which, as you know  is used for student assignments and resources, is a Blogger blog so there was existing familiarity for students on the look, feel, comment options, etc

That's basically it.

I wanted to see what it would be like to teach students to blog in the same environment I do, using the same tools.

The downside?

Blogger doesn't have the administrative abilities of Kidblogs. I can't moderate posts before they go up, I can't restrict access, I don't have the granular control over the content that I could with a platform such as EduBlogs or Kidblogs.

So why go with Blogger for 3rd and 5th graders if I don't have that restrictive control?

I wanted students to have independence and true ownership of their blogs. Yes, this does open up potential pitfalls. No, there are no moderations on my student blogs. They design, write, publish, and manage their blogs as they see fit.

We spend the majority of our time together talking about

• purpose
• audience
• appropriate writing & voice
• spam and phishing scams
• the nitty gritty of responsibility and digital citizenship when you own and publish from your own space

It's an experiment

I have 22 classes a week. 600 students. I started this experiment with a single 4th grade class (now 5th graders). I expanded to include a 3rd grade class this year, to see how the different ages would approach it.

Will I do this with 600 students?

Probably not. 600 blogs is a bit too much to keep track of, even with the best of RSS feed readers.

I may experiment with the other platforms next year. I encourage the classroom teachers in my building to try those platforms out (at this point most teachers have a teacher-run class blog that students comment on, or "guest post" but have no control over design, etc).

If you would like to check out my student blogs they'd love to see their audience stats change:

• 3rd graders
• 5th graders

They also love comments, so if you feel so inclined...


What about next year?

That is a good question. These 5th grades are the first to have independent blogs. At this point the thought is they'll change ownership of it from their PS10.org GAFE accounts to a personal GMail account (their own or that of a parent) and continue working on it after they graduate.

The 3rd graders will definitely continue. Their blogs will be an ongoing part of their digital portfolio and the foundation for their digital footprint. I plan on using their blogs as the focal point for much of what we do next year.

Will I add another class? Honestly haven't decided yet. Might. Might not. Might give Kidblogs a shot. Possibilities are endless and I have as much fun experimenting and trying new things as the kids do, and at it's core I think that is why having their own independent blogs has worked so well.

I've given them ownership of their own voice and a place to speak to the world. A place to create an audience. A platform to tell their own story as they see fit.

Powerful stuff. But fun. Very, very fun. And at the end of the day that's what matter...

Thanks!

Email spam - sniffing out the bad, even from trusted sources

This post is a follow-up, of sorts, to the previous "Twitter spam" and "Phishing" posts. In making the slide deck about Twitter spam I realized there were a few different variations of spam in general, especially within emails.

This post deals specifically with email, and more to the point emails you receive from trusted sources that contain questionable material and links.

When a user gets hacked or compromised as a result of a phishing scheme, the people involved will use the users contacts list to send out emails in hopes of getting more users to give up their usernames and passwords.



This scam is particularly effective since you get an email from someone you know and trust, so your guard is down. The idea is to lull you into a false sense of security that the content of the email is safe since it got sent from someone you know and you recognize both the name and email address.

Once you click the links and enter your password you then turn your account over to the hackers who in turn send emails from your address to your contacts in an attempt to get even more users to give up their passwords.

A lot of email spam originates as "phishing" scams. These are emails designed to get the user to voluntarily offer up their username and password. These emails convince the recipient they need to pride details, or log in, to prevent something bad from happening. Once the user replies or logs in the scammers have their passwords and can use their accounts to send out spam to a users address book.

I created this quick tutorial for my colleagues to help them recognize and identify emails sent from compromised accounts:

Recognize spam email (even if you trust the sender)

We will never be immune from phishing scams and spam, and everyone will be compromised at one point or another (through their actions of those of others) but as GI Joe always said, knowing is half the battle...

Phishing: not the hook you're looking for

This post is a follow-up, of sorts, to the previous "Twitter spam" post. In making the slide deck about Twitter spam I realized there were a few different variations of spam in general, especially within emails.

This post deals specifically with "phishing"

Another post will address email arriving from trusted sources but smelling particularly spammy due to phishing...

If Twitter has it's moments of Costco-sized spam deliveries than email is the place where Costco shops. 

A lot of email spam originates as "phishing" scams. These are emails designed to get the user to voluntarily offer up their username and password. These emails convince the recipient they need to pride details, or log in, to prevent something bad from happening. Once the user replies or logs in the scammers have their passwords and can use their accounts to send out spam to a users address book.

I created this quick tutorial for my colleagues to help them recognize and identify phishing scams:

We will never be immune from phishing scams and spam, and everyone will be compromised at one point or another (through their actions of those of others) but as GI Joe always said, knowing is half the battle...

Know your Twitter spam

Periodically I try to create & post resources that I hope the entire PS 10 community; students, staff, and parents alike, find valuable. This is one of those posts. Spam comes in many forms but since we use Twitter so extensively here at PS 10 I wanted to create a Twitter-specific resources for recognizing and protecting yourself from Twitter-related spam.

Twitter has it's moments of Costco-sized spam deliveries.

We've all seen it. Or more to the point you got a Direct Message (DM) saying "wow, have you seen this post about you?" with a on-so-not-suspicious link attached. Or the ego enhancing "I've lost weight with this, and you could too!"

When this spam comes through I immediately delete it and let the sender know they most likely have been compromised. It's not always the users fault, though. Recently Pinterest was compromised and was sending out tweets to those users who had connected their Pinterest and Twitter accounts.

I created this quick tutorial for the PS 10 community to help everyone recognize and identify suspicious DMs and tweets:

We will never be immune from spam, and everyone will be compromised at one point or another (through their actions of those of others) but as GI Joe always said, knowing is half the battle...

3rd Grade - Spring Break 4/2014 - Building the biggest

Have you ever seen a very large boat? How about a big cruise ship? Often, out in New York harbor you can see very large ships carrying containers. They are shipping goods throughout the world.

Have you ever seen one of those giant container ships being built....?

Below is a video of the largest shipping container ship being built. The video is a time-lapse video comprised of 50,000 pictures. You will be able see the entire ship built in 76 seconds...

You can read about the video here and here.

Your assignment:

Watch the video and then comment with answers to these questions:

• Have you ever seen one of those ships in New York harbor (or anywhere else)?
• What are your thoughts about the video?
• What is one thing that stood out to you the most after watching the video?

Please post your comments in full and complete sentences with proper grammar, spelling & punctuation.

Have a great Spring Break!

Remember - Comment as "Name/URL" and use your first name and last initial (proper capitalization, no URL)- please respond in full and complete sentences - double check your work before posting your comment.