Last Class

The last class was an interesting time. I enjoyed seeing the wide variety of topics covered by the digital stories as well as the use of audio editing that some students used to give their stories suspense, comedy, etc. The songs at the end were an interesting touch for the last class. I have yet to have a teacher in my 16 years of schooling that has played songs on the last day of class and it was a good ending. I enjoyed the light hearted mood of it quite a bit. I have definitely enjoyed this class quite a bit and feel as though that I have learned a lot of useful technology tools that I would not have learned otherwise. I now feel much better equipped to make my class a fun and technology savvy learning environment.

Thanks Curby!

Better Late than Never

I think that researching assistive technology was a great way to spend a class period and a good subject for an assignment. It is important that we as future teachers are aware of the problems our future students may face and they tools they may use to overcome them. Our group also used this as a good opportunity to work on our nonlinear power point skills. I feel that we all have a greater understanding of how to utilize a tool that gives power point a whole new dimension. Another thing that I took from this class was that there are vast resources on the web to help teachers better understand their students with disabilities.

Educational applications for this week is that you could use a power point like the ones presented in class to perhaps help the students better understand what the student with disabilities has and why they have it. Also the non-linear power point is a good tool for classroom games or maybe a make your own story activity.

Were those the three major categories of assistive technology or just the three that are most relevant to the classroom?

Educational Tech Eval

A bit thing this week is that I would definitely feel more comfortable searching for useful educational software now than before. It is good to have some guidelines to narrow your search. It is also very useful to have a breakdown of the different types of software available, so you can mold your software choices to fit what you are trying to accomplish by using the technology. It is also interesting to see that there is software available to assist teachers with their daily activities. I would definitely be interested in looking into that when the time comes.

There are obviously many applications that can be applied through the use of software in the classroom. Simulation software can give students a chance to do or experience something that they would not be able to do otherwise. This presents them with a unique learning experience. Another application is regardless of what you are using the software to do is that students are always excited to work with technology and computers. Software would be a great way to motivate students and keep their attention.

Working on the assistive tech projects are any of the tools provided by the school in order to meet the least restrictive environment?

Language arts

An interesting thing that I have been finding throughout this class is that many of the technologies available are transferable across many subjects. For instance, podcasts and digital stories are useful in every subject. However, it seems that podcasts would be especially helpful in developing fluency and literacy. Another thing that I thought was neat was the programs available to make concept maps and worksheets. In my teaching experiences I had always wondered where these well designed activity sheets were coming from and how I would make them once I was on my own. Also, the fact that blogs are available in a more student friendly format makes that seem like much more of appealing technology due to the added control features for the teacher, sorry blogger.

Some educational applications that I thought were particularly good was the use of the podcast. It covers so many important parts of literacy instruction; writing, revising, reading orally, etc.
I also thought that using blogs would provide a good assessment opportunity similar to exit cards in the classroom. You could have the students post what they learned and any questions they may have had.

A question that arose was how open are schools to the concept of blogging due to the fact that students may not have computers or access to the internet?

A cool thing I found this week was the wealth of examples and instructional strategies available on the online instructional strategies glossary. It provides a ton of detailed information and ideas for presenting information to the class. I also enjoyed better learning how to use primary access. We had talked about it in Prof Grimes' class but I did not recall exactly how to use it or access it. A third thing I found beneficial this past week is how to access and use Google Earth and all the features it has. I had heard about it but never gotten a chance to see it utilized.

The educational applications for everything we talked about a pretty vast especially primary access. That is a really neat tool because it is very similar to photostory but students can access it from any computer and do not need specific software which means that it could be given as a long term project for students. I also think that time line constructor online is a great tool for documenting events and giving a student a concept of how to use a time line and the elapse of time with regards to different historical events.

One question that I have from this past week is how to make nonlinear power points since we did not get a chance to cover that. I had seen them used before in the classroom to make games and exploratory tools and they seem like they would be very useful.

Math and Science w/ Tech

I thought the amount of resources online for teaching math and science were very impressive. The playing with time website would be great to show a class and could work in to many different science lessons. It also provides the students an opportunity to observe changes like that of a forest over a year that they perhaps would never see. The smart board also seems like it would be helpful to use in a classroom, but it seems that interacting with the smart board may be kind of difficult for kids in lower grades. The board does not always write exactly where you are depending on your positioning in relation to the projector. This could be frustrating for small children. Also the capability to make your own time lapse videos with a web cam and a movie editor. This also presents some exciting possibilities for the classroom. The videos would be personal to the students and it would also serve a good review/refresher tool.

The smart board has numerous applications for the classroom. When I was doing my 488 lessons last semester we used the smart board to go over worksheets as a class and had the students come up and write their answers on the worksheet that was projected on the smart board.
Another application from last Tuesday was the video capture program that takes photos at specific time intervals this could be useful to document the growth of a plant in the classroom for a science lesson. The students would be able to watch the plant grow as the year progressed. However, after the plant was fully grown the students could watch the video and see the various stages the plant went through in close succession.

One question I have is for the science sites that require a subscription fee; do any schools buy a school wide subscription that they make available to all teachers?

Digital Story

The Big Ideas I got from this weeks blog post is that digital story telling is a fun form of presenting information. It is like telling a story to someone over the phone with accompanying snapshots of each event. I think that this could be a good resource to share among teachers because teachers could swap lessons or presentations that utilize digital stories. Also the constant transition between audio and photo if done well does a good job of maintaining the viewers attention.

Educational applications could to present information to students using this medium such as a lesson. However, I think it would be entirely too time consuming and take up valuable class time to have the children to construct a story of their own. I had a difficult time getting my microphone to register enough of my voice to be heard over the music. It would seem that there would be endless problems having the students make their own.

One thing I was curious about was the fact that the program seemed to insert a small transition of silent audio between slides. Is there anyway to control that, or was I just too slow clicking the stop recording button.

Digital Story

A main thing that struck me about todays class was how quickly technology has shaped the classroom. A decade or two ago this class would cover about one tenth of the technology addressed in this course due to the fact it was too expensive or nonexistent. Another thing that struck me was how easy it is to construct a digital story. I feel as though I have a decent enough grasp on the program that I could tell one of my friends how to use the program. I also thought that the examples were a great source of ideas due to how much they varied in their acquisition of the photo as well as the narrative made by each individual student. It definitely gave me a few ideas of what I am going to do my story on and where I am going to get my pictures.

I think this is a great tool for students who have become either bored or disillusioned with writing. Writing something on paper quickly gets boring and having a teacher type if up for you and put it on fancy paper can only go so far. However, this method allows the children to see their ideas to come into fruition not just in words but images and would definitely get them excited about the writing process.
Another application I think that would be interesting for digital story telling is to have the students use a digital story to make a research project much more interesting. Like a podcast it would have students working together and learning from each other, but it adds the visual aspect that would give the finished product much appeal. In addition, finding photos relating to their topic would help them gain more knowledge through making visual connections and sense of the historical time period.

One question I still have is if there are any free or affordable programs for windows that allow for the use of video in the digital storytelling process.

Pod Casts

The use of the podcast presents an exciting new application for technology in the classroom. The podcasts in useful in that it fosters a sort of academic community among the children that are making the podcast because they must do the research on the topic. It also allows for a greater understanding of the topic due to the fact that the children must research it then decide what they think is important. I also think it is important due to the fact that it may expose kids who do not have a large amount of technological access at home to a fun use of technology.

The educational applications beyond what is mentioned above is that is provides for a catalog of knowledge the students can access through linking up with other classes that do podcasts. Another application could be to record important assemblies or lectures and post it on the school website, so that children who are absent have an opportunity to keep up.

My main question is still where to find more sounds and effects that are free to use and are not copyrighted because what we found in the production of our podcast seemed very limited.

Personal Webpage

One of the main things that I learned in class this week is that is it way easier to use the Nvu program to edit a web page than to manually type in the html code, which I had to do in a previous class. Another thing that was beneficial to learn is that this software is free to use and download onto a computer which makes the program more useful and accessible. Finally, the design elements were helpful for future reference in order to make a well designed and functional website. I also found that the fair use tutorial was beneficial in understanding what one can and cannot use legally on a web page.

The knowledge of how to make a website could be used in an instructional setting by making a web page for my class when I begin to teach. The students could check the web page for assignments if the student was absent. Another instructional application could be to keep a class calendar on the web page to keep the students informed about upcoming units and topics to be covered.

One question I still have is how does one go about posting a video or music onto a web page?