The Techno Cheetah

Many students love using Pixie 2 in technology class.  Pixie 2 makes it easy for students to combine drawing, photos, audio recordings and text into video files as well as printed files with layouts such as comic books, trading cards, and greeting cards.

With support from Tech4Learning, Bellows Spring is able to offer Pixie 2 for students to use at home.  Parents can purchase a home license for $35 (plus tax).  This is a huge discount over the regular price of $54.95.  Plus, the Bellows Spring technology department gets $10 for every license purchased!  The funds our school receives will be used to enhance the educational software and hardware for teachers and students.

Look for the Pixie 2 ordering form in September 18’s Friday folder or download the form by clicking here.  Orders are due no later than October 15.

Just added to the Student Project Gallery:
See how 4th graders learned to use the copyright symbol in their Poetry with Pixie projects.  The examples have a winter holiday theme.

Exemplary examples of third grade Pixie activities about word choice, one of the 6+1 Writing Traits, have been added to the Student Project Gallery.

There are several exciting changes this year for technology class:

1. Mrs. Quinn will be the new .6 technology teacher.  She will be at Bellows on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

2. Technology class will no longer be on wheels!  (I’m very happy about this as the computer cart was very heavy to push around the school.)  Technology class will be located in the portable that Mrs. Hughes occupied last year.

3. A new version of Pixie, Pixie 2, has been installed on all the laptops.

4. Although the order has not arrived, we will be receiving an interactive whiteboard.  An interactive whiteboard connects the computer to the projector and will allow the teacher and the students to control the computer from the projection on the whiteboard using a special pen.  This will make demonstrations and student presentations more interactive.  I can’t wait for it to arrive.

Whiteboard Image Source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Interactive_whiteboard_at_CeBIT_2007.jpg

Students in all grade levels got to a chance to use Pixie on the new laptop computers this year. Pixie is a program where students can paint and manipulate pictures to design their own artwork. Over the summer, the latest version of Pixie, Pixie 2, will be installed on the tech teacher laptop computers.

Pixie 2 has some exciting new features including:

• the ability to export multiple Pixie slides as a movie or podcast
• take a picture using the built in iSight camera and drag it to your artwork
• more clip art pictures
• the ability to record narration on each slide

Below is an example of a video podcast I made with my 2 1/2 year old daughter, Morgan, using Pixie 2. This example demonstrates the ability to record narration on each slide and combine the slides together in a video. Morgan choose the pictures and recorded the audio (dad helped, of course).
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