http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1624700/Untitled
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Many Thanks to my Colleagues
I want to thank my colleagues for their expertise and support throughout this course. Joe-for your help in using the digital camera; Tina-for help with Wordle and Xtranormal and their uploading onto my Wiki and Blog. Vicki-for helping me decide what to do for my digital project, for helping me set up my Moodle, and for your tireless assistance to me and my students as we learned how to navigate PhotoStory and PowerPoint. Steve-for helping me set up my Google Reader, explaining Diigo to me, for troubleshooting my Microsoft Office program, and telling me about SlideShare. Laurie and Roberta-for the humor and of course, Fozzie Bear! :)
Digital Project Reflection
I am very pleased with my digital project. Many teachers have created a global classroom using the tool Moodle as a vehicle. I never thought I would move into the 21st century but this gave me an opportunity to create a page to publish students' works and to document their efforts.
In the meantime, I needed to relearn some of the tools and explore new ones. I incorporated Wordle and Xtranormal into the page, having learned about them in this class. I also needed to learn and to teach students how to use power point to create their book commercial slide to place at the beginning of their Photo Story. The detail about saving their file to jpeg was an important one that was overlooked more than once. Students searched the web for just the right pictures to advertise their stories. Some searches were too specific; some too vague. The patient searcher tended to find just what they were looking for and it showed in their graphic grade. We realized it was important to create a folder first to put the pictures into and to rename the folder with the book title.
Students then imported their pictures into PhotoStory, dragged them into the correct sequence, and then recorded their dialog for each. They soon realized that their care with having written a final copy on their storyboards helped them do this step smoothly. Some tried to add music and more often than not, had it turned up too loudly so we had to edit the volume so we could hear them speaking. I have two students who have speech issues and who were uncomfortable speaking into the microphone. They chose to type their script and to have music playing in the background. One student typed his for effect and you will see in Flags of Our Fathers.
A final challenge was to save the project as a video and after a few tries, students who learned the correct procedure helped others. Vicki created a folder for me on the MS Library site to move their Photo Stories into.
Unfortunately, I learned that discs in digital cameras don't always work. The pictures I took to document their work, 38 to be exact, were on the camera and Joe taught me how to upload them into my computer, but my computer only brought in 5. I redid it and next it brought in only three. Vicki checked it out and there was only one left. Fortunately, I had used my son's camera one day and had enough to create the animoto. Both my seventh and eighth grade students are featured. :)
In the meantime, I needed to relearn some of the tools and explore new ones. I incorporated Wordle and Xtranormal into the page, having learned about them in this class. I also needed to learn and to teach students how to use power point to create their book commercial slide to place at the beginning of their Photo Story. The detail about saving their file to jpeg was an important one that was overlooked more than once. Students searched the web for just the right pictures to advertise their stories. Some searches were too specific; some too vague. The patient searcher tended to find just what they were looking for and it showed in their graphic grade. We realized it was important to create a folder first to put the pictures into and to rename the folder with the book title.
Students then imported their pictures into PhotoStory, dragged them into the correct sequence, and then recorded their dialog for each. They soon realized that their care with having written a final copy on their storyboards helped them do this step smoothly. Some tried to add music and more often than not, had it turned up too loudly so we had to edit the volume so we could hear them speaking. I have two students who have speech issues and who were uncomfortable speaking into the microphone. They chose to type their script and to have music playing in the background. One student typed his for effect and you will see in Flags of Our Fathers.
A final challenge was to save the project as a video and after a few tries, students who learned the correct procedure helped others. Vicki created a folder for me on the MS Library site to move their Photo Stories into.
Unfortunately, I learned that discs in digital cameras don't always work. The pictures I took to document their work, 38 to be exact, were on the camera and Joe taught me how to upload them into my computer, but my computer only brought in 5. I redid it and next it brought in only three. Vicki checked it out and there was only one left. Fortunately, I had used my son's camera one day and had enough to create the animoto. Both my seventh and eighth grade students are featured. :)
Learning Summary
I learned how to use several new tools to finish my learning summary. A flashdrive came in handy as I work from my computer at school to mine at homw. Fortunately, I did continue to save my power point to the hard drive. On the Friday before the information need to be posted, my power point would not open. I asked Steve to look at it and he said, "I hope you backed it up because something is wrong. I had a 2003 version of Microsoft Office I was using at school and had just loaded a 2007 one at home. We thought perhaps that might have been the issue so Steve upgraded my 2003 here at school but that would have been too easy. My home computer did still have the power point so I was able to make the deadline at 10:00, two hours to spare. I also have to thank Steve for telling me about SlideShare. This is a place to upload power points and save them for others to access. It only took a couple of minutes to load (at 9:40 am Saturday morning) and was thrilled to see it worked! Relearning how to create a powerpoint was fun and I decided not to use the timer as I found it hard to set it from slide to slide and I found myself speedreading through some and snoozing on others. Thus, it's set to advance on the mouse. To be able to take my favorite articles, videos, online conferences, and class notes and reorganize them was very beneficial to me. I hope you enjoy the power point!
If You Printed Twitter... Quantifying the Astounding Volume of Tweets
...you could fill 133,000 copies of the King James Bible
...if you laid those printed pages end to end, they could be wrapped around the world 2 times
...the paper would weigh 3.5 million pounds, the equivalent of 82 school busses fully loaded with 84 happy tweeting kids
...there's more so check out this blog: http://good.is/good blog
...if you laid those printed pages end to end, they could be wrapped around the world 2 times
...the paper would weigh 3.5 million pounds, the equivalent of 82 school busses fully loaded with 84 happy tweeting kids
...there's more so check out this blog: http://good.is/good blog
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Fat Cat on the Vineyard
Just wanted to practice bringing in an image of my cat enjoying her vacation on the Vineyard.
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