Week 5

Today we had Tyler Cecili come talk to us about Web 2.0. He highlighted on a few websites that are free and great to use within the classroom. He had highlighted that there are some websites that have the user not to to much work and others where the user has complete control. The few he highlighted on were; Prezi, Storybird, Popplet, Wordpress, and Socrative. Prezi is another website you can you to make a fancier PowerPoint. This website has different templates, but it is up to the user on how difficult and extravagant they want it. Prezi is where the user does not have much to put into the PowerPoint whereas Popplet is much more open to whatever the user wants to do. They begin from scratch and can do whatever designs they want. Then there is Socrative which is a quick easy way for teachers to get a quick response to material they are learning. The teacher can make a series of short answer, true/ false, or multiple choice questions that the students answer and right away the teacher can see what material the students understand and what problems the kids are getting caught up on. This is a great way to assess the students and allow the teacher to see what they should or should not spend more time on; as well as pinpointing the students who may need a little more help. Lastly, the most intriguing website I learned about was Storybird. This is an amazing website where the students can get rid of story block and begin writing a story with a collection of images they can choose to go along with the story. This would be awesome to use in the younger classes to let them get in touch with their creative side. I will use this in my classroom no matter what. This would be a great way to show the kids are creative and can write a story, and they could get these printed making the students confidence and attraction to learning much higher. Along with a presentation from Tyler showing us so many great tools we can use, we also finished up and went back over how to use Google Earth so we can take that skill away with us as well. On top of that we got broken into groups and went over the technology standards for teachers. Each group got a different standard and we simplified the terms to make a better understanding of what the standards truly are.Today's class was very informing and I took so much out of this class again for the fifth day. I will be keeping note of all the websites I was introduced to so I can use them within my classroom, as well as the standards with technology the teachers should be aware of.

Week 4

Today was a hectic day in class. We learned a little more on iMovie finishing up our previous project along with learning how to use I movie on an iPad. This was to have us wrap our head around how we could have no only us as a teacher benefit from this but also the students. My group tried to make a video math story problem. With only a few technical things to work out here and there the concept and idea was amazing. I left class knowing that I will 100% use this within my classroom. On top of that we learned out to go onto google earth and pick places we wanted to show and give information about, and have the viewer go on a little tour of the places we chose. I have a little more work to do but it is turning out so well. I would also use this within my classroom to make for the students to use and benefit from or in an older classroom have the students do exactly what I had done. I left from class today feeling so excited because, I am really getting opened up to so many more ideas and tools I can use within my own classroom to make it that much more interesting and I can benefit my students so much more. I can't wait until next week to see what we get to learn next.

Until next time!!

Week 3

Today was a whole new learning day in ED270. I learned how to use what is called iMovie on the Mac. I have never seen it before let alone dealt with something like it. It is basically a program that allows you to upload video clips of your own and make a video or even a trailer. Our assignment was to make a 30 second video on whatever we wanted. Thinking about it you may say that it seems like no time at all, that's what I thought. I was wrong, 30 seconds is a very long time where we had to have multiple short clips along with word "slides" and the title. We are able to add different title slides within the movie which can just play as script slides. We also learned how you can have a clip playing as well as but words on top of the clip. We didn't have a lot of time to play around with it, but the short time we had I have learned a lot and can't wait to get back to class to finish the movie off. It was just another awesome day in ED270.

Until next time!!

Week 2

Today was a busy day where sometimes I will admit.. I got lost. Today's be focus was on photoshop and not only how to work it, but how others work it to make pictures look real that really aren't. Today we learned how to look at pictures on the web or in magazines and find little things that most people wouldn't recognize that make the picture evident that it is fake. This could be a simple blur of some pixels or even a repeated mark on a door frame. On top of all that we got to take a picture we took, a internet picture, and then a scanned picture and put them all together. (This is where my brain lost it for awhile). We learned that on Photoshop you can do multiple layers within an image so you can manipulate one and not the other. We also learned how to erase certain parts of a picture to isolate just the part we wanted to keep and then select it. With many different tools and many different steps you could take we began to learn and form our own creation of pictures, (that hopefully went together). Overall today was filled with a lot of learning, and hopefully we can do more with photoshop and become more comfortable with it, because I find it to be so fascinating that you can do so much with just a few images.

Until next time!!