The End has come

Well you may have guessed it with finals week next week and all, yep our Technology class has come to an end. From a teacher standpoint I am very glad that we covered all that we did in this class because I will be able to use the knowledge of the programs that I worked with to better my teaching strategies in and out of the classroom. Thanks for the great times Jon! It was fun, a little frustrating at times but it was a good class. Now that I have created my game on scratch I can see the importance of us spending the time and effort that it took to create a project. It was fun once I got in and figured out how to do some of the things. I bid you all farewell and until we meet again have a great Christmas!

The Quest Continues!

As my title states the quest to build the snowman game continues. As the semester is coming to an end and all of these class projects and such are coming due I actually am having fun making this game. That's not to say that it is time consuming and a bit frustrating because it is both of those things very much so in fact but that's okay. In my last post I talked about not ever using these games in my class, or I should say not every taking the massive amounts of time that it takes to make my own game. I do think that they are valuable as long as they are planned out and have a learning objective as opposed to a means to entertain the students. This task is challenging but as these educational games are created they really can help the students learn the diverse topics that we as educators cover in our classes. Stay tuned for the end result!

Snowman

So this week we have started learning the ins and outs of the scratch program, and I must say that I am a little slow at picking this program up. Our assignment is to make an educational game and may I say that I have a good idea, but getting it to work out on the program is another story. I think these interactive educational games can be beneficial for the students in my class room. As for myself I most likely will not be making a game because it is time consuming and takes a lot of focus. The idea behind these programs are brilliant and I would like to capitalize on these great resources that have been made or can be made for the classroom. Stay tuned for more updates on my game!

UEN/Scratch

So this week has proven to be pretty fun and adventurous for sure. We have finished our UEN page and it was very benificial to see what different things we can include on our webstites and how accessable we can make our lesson plans, daily activities and any other activities we choose to do accessible to our students or their parents. In one of my other education classes we have the option of creating a website that we can use in our classrooms and the skills that we have been introcuced to by building our very own UEN page has been very valuable in deed. I can now apply the techniques and delve farther into the meat of what UEN has to offer. On another note we have the chance to get involved with Scratch. I am a little scared to tell the Truth and I do not know what I am going to do, or even how to do it for that matter. I know that the principles behind these skills that we well learn can be applied to the classroom in many ways. For one the activities that we create can help the students experience the material and learning objectives in a new light and really accomplish the tasks that these games have to offer. By completing tasks they can accomplish the learning objectives and by using these techniques learning can be made fun for children who have grown up in the information age.

Our Very own UEN Website!

Out of all of the assignments I am most excited about this upcoming UEN website. This week I have had the chance to finish up my flash project which was a little intimidating but I made it work out, I will not be using to much of the Flash technology in the classroom but it was neat to learn about. Our upcoming project as I have already talked a bit about is building our very own website, and I am most excited for this because during my years in the education program I have done alot of lesson plans and rubrics and different things but all of these things are all over the place and extremely disorganized so building this website is going to get all of my resources on the same page as it were and help me get ready to be a successful teacher. I love to be all organized. This website can be useful in many different ways. As an educator I can get on to the websites and see what creative things teachers out there are doing so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel but rather get inspiration from them and apply their great ideas into the lessons that I prepare. Also it will help me keep everything, all of my lessons and things in one spot so that I can be more organized. Stay tuned for the masterpiece!

Flash the boy genious!

So basically I haven't been doing to well keeping up on my blog but that does not mean that we are not doing anything worth mentioning in class because we have learned some interesting and useful information that can be used in class as well as outside of class. On Monday we had the chance to build our own google website and I had some fun putting some stuff together there. Websites can be used very easily in the classes that we as educators teach. We can make a class website and post all of the activities that we do in class that way if a student has to miss class they can know exactly what we did and know what to prepare for when they come back to class. It can be used similarly to blackboard in the sense that you can let the students access the web page and do different activities right there on the class web page. Let's face the facts here we live in a time where every student has a cell phone and can manage their way around the internet better than I can, so by applying technical techniques in our teaching methods we can tap into the students interests and really help them to grasp the ideas that we bring up in class. We have also went over very briefly Flash and I must say that it is a bit complicated but you can do some very cool things. I haven't really played with it too much so I don't know what I can do or even begin to do on it so for updates on how Flash will be coming to a History class near you stay tuned!

IMOVIE

This week we have been making our mini movies for our class. The ending goal was to create a movie that would introduce the topic and demonstrate to the students how to acomplish the task at hand. I must admit that it was a whole lot of fun and the skills that we started to sharpen will come in handy in the classroom. The end product that you see here on my blog could have been a bit more fine tuned but it was my first attempt at movie making and it turned out ok I thought. Some may ask how this relates to teaching students and do I have an answer for you! I can use Imovie to create many things in my class room that can help the students have fun with learning the different topics that we cover in class. The movie that I made pertained to science but I can easily make an instruction movie with a little planning and preparation. I can turn a trip that I took to a historical place into an in class field trip so that the students can still learn about the topics that we cover without having to step out side the classroom. It is an excelent way to present the material in a different way so that those students who learn better visually. More fun to come!

Chemicals Do indeed react!

I have made a movie!

This week we are working in groups to create a demonstrational movie for our individual content areas. In my case it is History and really I have struggled to find a topic that I can make a 5-6 minute demostrational movie about. I have puzzled over it for a while and finally my group decided to do one on a science experiment which is going to be much easier. The assignment is much more than just making a movie of sorts, or it is at least to me. By making movies and different things using imovie students can learn a whole new aspect of what ever topic that you teach. Lets face the facts here in our day the students in school thrive on things such as face book and technology of any sort so when you as the teacher introduce a topic using a movie that you made yourself it will get the students attention and they will take something from it. Imovie opens up doors to do digital field trips and presentations of things that you may not other wise get to cover. This assignment will be challenging but I can apply the principles and things that I learn from it into helping my students better understand History. I may not do to many demonstration movies but I can do other things that will help the students learn the material better.

The Power of PhotoShop

This week I had one of those eye opening aha(not how you spell it) moments when I finally realized how much that a person can do with Photoshop. Our teacher has given us an assignment to make a poster for our class, and I have been thinking and thinking about what I can do, and then all of the sudden it clicked, Why don't I make a propaganda poster using Dr. Sues! It was a genius idea. I haven't gotten all of the details worked out but I know that by using the tasks that we have learned this week in class with all of the different tools in Photo shop, I can really do pretty much whatever I need to do for my history classes. I have yet to explore the endless possibilities but through this class and the assignments of this week I will defiantly take full advantage of these endless possibilities.

Photo Shop

What a week it has been in our InsT class. We have picked up (or at least attempted to) some pretty neat tricks in the program Photo Shop. What wonderful things can be done with one simple program. I am still getting the hang of it a bit, but the purpose of learning about photo shop this week is to help us broaden our horizon and get us thinking out side of the box. In my specific content area of History Education I can use this Photo shop program to edit any pictures that I would like. How cool is that. What a fun way to make things more fun and interesting for each student in my class. The whole purpose of teaching is to help students learn and comprehend the material presented. In the past teachers have just spewed forth tons upon tons of information and have expected the students to regurgitate that information when it came time to take the test. By making class fun, and in this case it will be using images, and things such as this edited in photo shop to make learning fun and exciting for the students. If the material is presented in a different variety of ways the likelihood of students actually understanding and comprehending the information is very high!!!

This week in class we explored the many facets of Iphoto as well as Comic Life. It was very neat to see what kinds of different things we can do with just a simple picture. In the classroom we as teachers can utilize multiple sources such as Iphoto and Comic life to present the information in new and diverse ways that may help the students learn the material covered better. It is a lot of fun to run these programs and I will surely be exploring in more detail what these programs can do and what different things they can offer for the students of my class. We can even have our students use these programs to create class projects and different things like that. All-in-all these programs will add a whole different dimension in how the material can be presented and how it can be learned.

Technology Class this week

This week in class we discussed Alignment theory and the different ways that we as teachers can apply the principles in our different learning activities that we create in order to help students accomplish the learning objectives that we have for our classes. We talked about the great resource that these learning activities can bring to the classroom, but also the difficulties that exist in creating a well thought out/well created learning activity that both engages the students and helps them to learn the important information in order for the concepts to "click" with each student. Another issue is the fact that each student learns in their own time and in their own way so are these learning activities the best way to teach the material so that everyone can understand it?