End of semester

Well finally, here is the end of the semester. On one hand it feels like this semester has flown by and on the other it couldn't have come soon enough. At the beginning it was hard to gauge how much I really thought I would learn. As far as the tools and projects, I feel like its really hit or miss. Some of them I will definitely use in my real life and others I doubt I'll remember next year. I've already made two additional google sites (for my rugby team, and a personal one) and started a travel blog for my summer backpacking trip in Hawaii. Not to mention, I use google docs for EVERYTHING. These are valuable tools that have forever changed the ease and experience of my academic and non academic life. Now it's hard to even imagine life before google docs. The one thing I expected to learn from the course and didn't was Prezi. I guess I know older education students who learned Prezi through the education dept and figured this is where. Not that its hard to pick up, but going through a "practice project" with the new tools was definitely helpful. The best part of this class has really been the level of authenticity in assessment. It's been such a relief to be "working" towards good grades vs merely "studying."

Website

I loooooved learning how to use google sites! I have since made two others and will definitely continue to utilize this tool. For the most part, it's user friendly (especially compared to html sites.) Once you figure out how to use it, the possibilities are endless! I hope it will be appropriate in my classroom one day to make a project for students, where they create their own google site. It's too useful to do otherwise, really. I especially like the idea of using a website as a portfolio of your work. I really can't stress enough how helpful project especially has been.

Digital Story: The San Diego Zoo

Using iMovie took a few moments of learning to do the basic tasks (wasn't really self-explanatory), but after this it was really easy to use. I think the only downside has been that I didn't know how to do everything that the program is capable of. I think for the next project I would learn more about further capabilities and add more video to my presentation instead of just photos. This is a great way for students to present photo/video projects as opposed to now I think most students just take the video straight from the camera to present.

IWB

When viewing the examples before we started the project I thought it was neat and could be really useful, especially for a review. After using the software, I thought it was hard to use and took a long time to create for the product I got out of it. The software also had some weird quirks in it. For some reason I couldn't manipulate the tools/graphics the way I should have been able to. (ie when using the arrows it kept just disappearing.) In my classroom I'm really not sure how much I would use this software beyond just making pretty basic powerpoints. For the next time I use an IWB, I would make the graphics/diagrams outside the software and just import them in as an image, rather than trying to create them inside Inspire.

answer questions

Inspiration

This project went really smoothly and the tool was easy to use. My biggest complaint is just the speed of the program. There was a fairly large lag time whenever I changed the font type. Once I changed the font it also didn't stay set as the default, which would be convenient. For me as a teacher I think this program would be most convenient as a tool to help categorize topics and items. Next time I would use pictures differently. I don't think they are very useful in the example above. I think there are other subjects/topics where they would be more useful. I also think the layout could be improved. There is to much extra space on the top left corner.

Scavenger Hunt: in Picasa and Google Presentation

For this project, it was really easy to use Picasa and Google Presentation. It was also really easy to embed each of those things. It's also nice how easy it is to change the resolution of a picture on an apple computer. The hardest part of the project was honestly finding things to match the descriptions for the scavenger hunt in 40 minutes.
I instantly thought this project would be a great summary of physics concepts. Students could take pictures of things illustrating various physical principles (fluid dynamics, angular momentum, friction, etc.) I would also ask students to explain the principle and demonstrate how each thing illustrates its associated principle.
If I were doing this project I would allow more time for students to think/find the objects to photograph. It could be a week-long take home project rather than having one class period to complete all the photos.