1. If you’re going to alter people’s voices to make girls sound like guys and guys sound like girls, subtle changes are best. If the changes are too dramatic, they just sound silly. Don’t change the pitch of the voice too much.
2. Subtle changes in the speed someone talks at change how you perceive their voice. A slighter faster voice sounds higher (and more feminine) and a slightly slower one sounds lower (and more masculine).
3. Audacity is limited in how many different tracks you can have in use at once. It seems to handle ten to 20 just fine, but some kids had more and we had to trim that down. If we didn’t the program would crash repeatedly. That was quite frustrating until I figured it out. None the less, considering the software is free and pretty easy to learn (and also comes in a portable version you can take with you) it’s pretty hard to complain.
4. This assignment was fun. Though it took a few weeks from beginning to end, the kids were usually pretty motivated. Even the kids who are often unmotivated didn’t complain. I either have an unusually eager bunch of kids this year, or researching and “interviewing” famous late, great Canadians is actually something that Grade 9 students enjoy.

Overall it was a great project and it will be repeated next year.

I have used 21 Classes. It’s a nice site with fairly easy to figure out controls. When I first tried it out they let you sign up 50 students for free. That’s been cut back to 10 which isn’t terribly useful. For $8.95/month you can raise that to 100, but with classroom budgets under strain it’s not easy to find $89.50/year for blogging.

KidBlog seems to be a new and cool solution to the problem. For those who blog on other sites, it seems to run off a WordPress engine (which I like). From the teacher’s point of view, it allows you to create sttudents without them having to have e-mail. You can set it so student posts must be approved by you first, and you can even keep your whole blogging coummunity private  if you like.

KidBlog also allows you to set up multiple teachers/administrators on one account, and seems to have some way to link the kids to more than one class. This opens up room for collaboration between teachers and classes which could have interesting possibilities at the high school end of things.

As far as appearances go, KidBlog offers only two templates for personalizing your site. It’s not much, but this isn’t a crucial issue unless you’re hyper sensitive about their design choices.

KidBlog is free at this point and there’s no indication that any change is in the works. It looks like a pretty cool blogging platform that will satisfy almost any teacher, and almost any administrator.

However, Opera has just released a new version of their browser that they’re calling “Unite” because it pulls a whole lot of services together. While it’s a pretty decent web browser (though it feels different from Firefox) it can also help you set up a simple webserver, chat room and a few other neat features that run entirely off your home (or possibly work) computer.

Though it’s now comparatively easy to get a good chat room, there are times I’ve hunted  for one that was private and safe for my students and I couldn’t find one. Having one running on my home computer would solve that since its existence would be known only to me (and my students), hence there would be no creepy people there that I’d have to worry about.

A webserver running on your computer can also give you a bit of privacy when sharing webpages with photos, student work, etc.

The real great part with this is that it’s all designed for the non-geek. Setup time for me was about five minutes (but I’m a bit geeky so it might be longer for you). It’s really, really simple.

The two downsides to this that I can see are that the URLs for the services are ridiculously clunky. For example, for a webserver your URL might be mycomputer.user.operaunite.com/webserver. It doesn’t exactly role off the tongue. This might be fixed in a later version of the Opera browser.

The second problem is  a little more fundamental. Though most people can download to their computer fairly quickly, in most cases uploading from your computer is comparatively slow. Upload speeds (which is what will matter when someone downloads a webpage from your computer, if you follow) are quite slow in most cases. This may make your webserver, or chat room, etc seem comparatively clunky.

Despite the flaws I think Opera is on to something with this new version of their browser. Good job, guys.

The site is supported with ads – which is hardly outrageous – but it does mean you have to be a bit cautious when using this with students. Unlike Google ads, the ones I saw seemed to have no connection with the content of the page. Consequently the nature of the ads may not always be appropriate to school age kids.

They’ve been using Weebly for the exercise. Weebly is a really amazing site that allows you to create your own website using one of their subdomains (something.weebly.com) or lets you attach your own domain name (for free on their part) if you know how to do the technical stuff.

There’s a lot of cool templates and lots of easy things you can pull into you site like YouTube videos and a long series of pictures.

The only thing you give away is a single line at the bottom of every page that says “Create a free website with Weebly.” That’s hardly a high price to pay for something like this.

While the projects, as they get done, are fairly amazing, we are having some frustrations with Weebly. It’s sometimes, and inconsistently, difficult to edit text, or delete parts you’ve added to a page. The inconsistency suggests that the bugs aren’t completely ironed out on Weebly’s end. Adding YouTube videos is a bit cumbersome and hardly intuitive.

I imagine these things will all be ironed out as Weebly grows, and so I’d readily recommend Weebly for classroom activities or personal use.

I don’t have a smart board that can record all my doodles, so I took pictures of my diagrams as I made them, put them in a powerpoint and uploaded them. I need to work on the contrast on the white board I used (the glare caused problems), but it wasn’t a bad first attempt. The concept is worth trying again. The execution needs a bit of work.