Week Without Class Reflection

This week I spent quite a bit of time working on my Digital Story. Our pod was trying to figure out how to combine both our music and our narration. We couldn't figure out how to do it on Window's Movie Maker, so we decided to combine it on Garage Band on an apple. I think that this experience really helped me learn a lot of different media. I am now sure what type of systems I will be working on at the school I teach at and I will have to know how to use a variety of programs. This experience for me was a lot of work but it really benefitted me in the way that I can learn how to use a variety of programs. I also think that making a Digital Story won't just help me have a fun video to show my students. It helps me learn how to work with technology better in my classroom and I will be able to help my colleagues with the different programs that they don't know how to work. After helping them with the different programs, they will be better able to help their students in the classroom with technology and be able to use technology more in their classroom because it won't be as intimidating when they know how to use it.

Week 6 Reflection

Digital stories are a great tool to communicate to your students, whether it is an example of a digital story you made or an instructional story on how to make a digital story and each step you take to make one. Students' lives now days are spent watching TV and spending time on the computer and a great way to communicate with them is through these media sources. I think you are able to communicate to parents with digital stories by posting some on your website about whatyou are going to cover throughout the year or that unit and letting them know ahead of time whae the assignments are going to be. It also helps the parents get to know you better from the digital stories you post and how to better work with you as their children's teacher.

MILLENIAL GENERATION VIDEO: I think this video gives you an insight into what the kids are thinking towards technology and what they know about technology. I think that as long as there is money being put into the research and building of technology, there are going to e so many advancements throughout the years and everyone of the students I teach will see these advancements and learn how to use them. So we need to teach them in school how to use the basics of technology now because a lot of students don't get that knowledge at home.

Week 5 Blog

Digital stories would be really fun for students I think. It does take a lot of work but when you set aside time in class for your students to work on it and take it one step at a time. I think students would enjoy making a movie about something they are leaning in school or about a story in their life. It would help them create in a different way than the regular paper and pencil. It helps them use digital pictures and their own vice to create a story. I think that having students make digital stories and share them with other classes is great becuase it has other students and teachers see what students can do with technology. I think sharing your own digital stories with other teachers is very helpful because you can use the video without taking all of the time to make your own stories. You can base a story from one of the classroom objectives and have the students watch it and pair it with an activity.

DID YOU KNOW 2.0 VIDEO: This video was very interesting for me to watch to see where this world is going in the aspects of technology. It was crazy how many text messages are sent per day and how impersonal our communications have gotten. It is also cool to see how much information is on the internet and how often people turn to the internet to find information. It would be so easy to deceive people on the internet and you have to be very careful when searching the internet for information. This video also presents the need for students in the classroom to start learning how to use a computer and the internet at a young age so they can be involved with the technological change going on in the world.
A VISION OF STUDENT TODAY VIDEO: This video is so true about college life. As students we are expected to perform a variety of different tasks each day for everyone of our classes so we can better the world when we graduate. I think students today are learning various ways to get around doing these tasks quickly so they can finish all of them. Teachers may think that assigning all of these tasks are helping these students make the world better but in reality it is hurting because they have so many other expectations they cannot put enough effort and time into what they should. As a teacher I think I need to remember this concept and how it can help of hurt the students I teach and if the homework I assign is really helping them learn what I would like them to learn.

Week 4 Reflection

This week we learned about digital stories. We watched a few examples and then got in our PODs to do the rest of the work. I think that digital stories take a lot of time and work but that they are very worth it. I enjoy making movies so it is fun for me take these videos now and I will continue to make them for not only my own life but to help teach my students. Digital stories also bring variety into the classroom, which I think is very important with teaching kids. You can keep the structure of the class but still have some different ways of teaching. With the technology that we have in our world, it is a great fun way to have the stuents get involved with technology. It is also useful to save paper becuase if the students create a digital story instead of the regular book, they won't waste paper and they will be able to have it for a longer amount of time. Also having students make digital stories is a different way of writing a story becasue it uses pictures that they didn't draw and they don't actually have to have word written down. It involved different media and with that gets kids to be more creative in the way they use it. Something you have to be careful of when making a digital story is keeping short. It is tempting to go over five minutes and add a lot of information into the story because there are so many resources out there to use.
The video this week was really interesting. I didn't know that so many astronauts died in flights or practices. I knew space flight was dangerous but I didn't think it was that fatal until I watched this video. I also thought it was cool how the video shared other things that have come from the NASA research. I didn't know that Kennedy was the President when Nasa sent a man to the moon and I really liked the speech that was in the video and how it sounded as if Kennedy was the speaker.

Technology Tool Blog #2

The technology website that I found is The National Archives Website video section that has a lot of primary source videos about the economy and different things that affect it. The website address is http://video.google.com/nara.html. Even though it is through Google, you know it is reliable because it works through The National Archives website. A lot of the videos are 10 min-30 min, which seem long for elementary students so you would have to cut it to the exact spot you would like to show your students. There are a lot of videos and it would be hard to watch them all, because they are so long, to find the right one you wanted. But it is also beneficial to have so many video sources because there are a lot of subjects that go with each video. It is also really cool because the videos are filmed in the past so some of them are black and white and they are some news coverage from the past. The actual National Archives websites, www.nara.gov, has a lot of primary source documents as well. I would use this website to find pictures and documents that I will use to teach my students from that era of time. I think that it is important to teach with primary sources because it directly takes the students to that time period. The website is a little difficult to figure out. There is a teacher section that you can go to and search and it sorts out what wouldn’t be very beneficial to teach elementary students. Once you figure out how to get to the teacher website and find what you need, it is a very useful website to teach any social studies topic. The videos also work well with Zamzar so you can convert the files and use them whenever, not just when you have the internet.

Technology Tool Blog #1

The technology tool that I found where I was able to use information from was pbs.org/teachers/. I found it very helpful because I was able to find great websites to use in my lesson plans and fun for the students. You can search in almost any topic but I chose to search under social studies economics because I am writing a lesson plan for that topic and I thought it would be good to include some of the websites for the students to look at on our web quest. There was a website that I found where students can create their own pop star and learn how to handle the money and get everything paid off and how the economy was affected. I think this would be a fun way to assess the students on what they learned with budgeting. This website also talks about the tricks of advertising and how owners try to make things look cool. It also has links to different commercials and you can have students watch and see what the makers do to make the product look cool. Something I found with some of the websites was it was hard to convert the video on that website to the mp4 format. I couldn’t figure out what format to use so I wasn’t able to convert some of the videos. You have to be very careful that you don’t pick a video that won’t convert to mp4. This website also has links to non-online tools so you can teach students if you don’t have access to computers all the time. I thought this website is very good to use because it brings a lot of kid friendly websites into one big website and they are very educational. It also uses familiar cartoon shows on PBS to teach these lessons which would make it even more fun for my students.

Week 3 Reflection

This week we learned about how to use information from the internet into our lesson plans. We went onto Youtube and Teachertube to learn how to convert the videos on Zamzar.com. I have never heard of Zamar before so I am excited to use it more often in the future as well as the teaching I am doing now. This information is going to help me teach my lessons because the students will be entertained and they don't have to hear me all day. It is nice to have other resources to help you teach and I think that if the resources are out there then why not use them. We also went onto Engrade to see our grades and learned how to check them. This is a helpful resource not only so we can know what our grades are in this class, but we will be able to use it when we are teaching so the parents wll be abe to check their students grades any time they want. I think that the parents can enjoy these videos by having their children show them the videos. You can also put the videos on the website so the parents will be able to watch them and know what the students learned that day. I think you can also use other teachers to help download the different videos so you don't have to wait all the time it takes to convert the video. This will save a lot of time for all of the teachers and increase your library for different videos. You can also use the stimulations to add variety to the classroom and if there is going to be enough computers, you can have the students do the stimulations themselves or they can do it in a group.