Google Presentation and Interactive White Board

This week, we finished up our Google Presentations. I made a slideshow of mammals using photos from Pics4Learning. It is embedded below.




The interactive white board is an amazing resource that we have just started learning about. There are so many actions and lessons you can do with it. "Interactive white board" is also the generic term for the resource. Some brand names are the "Smart Board" and the "Promethean Board." We were shown one lesson from many that can be downloaded from Promethean Planet, which has tons of FREE resources for teachers. Basically, they give you a free bank of resources to make you want/pay for the board, which can be very pricey. The only thing you have to be careful about is any teacher can upload a lesson they've created, so some of them may be great, but some may be pretty bad also. For our class, we will be downloading a software program called ActivInspire to develop our lessons. This software is free if you have a code that comes with a board. I am really excited to develop skills with the interactive white board, but I will be disappointed if I end up not having one when I start teaching, ha!

Glogster

This week, we finished up our ABC scavenger hunt and used those photos in a Picasa Web Album (seen below), and we learned about Glogster. Glogster is kind of like a blog, but it it much more involved regarding layout, graphics, etc. I created a Glog using the "edu" version of Glogster (FREE!), which can be seen below, about the Cherokee Indians just to stay on the track that I've been going down with some of my other projects. I found it time consuming to make and get all the graphics the way I wanted them, but it ends up producing a great finished product that could be very stimulating for a class to look at. I think it would be too difficult for most elementary-age children to use as a tool on their own, so this would be a teaching tool. I also had slight difficulty getting it to embed properly, but it finally embedded correctly.

Picasa Web Album

This is an example of a Picasa Web Album that I created. My group went on an "ABC Scavenger Hunt" to find objects around campus that corresponded with the letters A-L. I was able to embed the slideshow and put it on my blog, here.

Web 2.0 Project

This week in class, we finished our Web 2.0 project on Wordle. My partner and I presented a step by step tutorial for how to work Wordle. We had some difficulty with Java because neither one of us is super technologically knowledgeable, so it took a few minutes before the entire class had activated Java. The rest of the tutorial went pretty smoothly. The only thing to me that was difficult was that Wordle itself wasn't the easiest tool to learn how to use, let alone trying to teach others to use. In hindsight, I wish we had kind of practiced what we were going to say and how we were going to present to the class. It wasn't a bad presentation; it just could've been better.

Next week, we will continue to view other people's presentations on their Web 2.0 projects and work further with photo apps like Picasa and Flikr.

Web 2.0 - Wordle

This week, we worked on our Web 2.0 projects. Our project was on the web application Wordle. We found it to have great potential as a classroom tool. The projects you can create with Wordle can be very visually appealing. We created a few different ones for our Wiki, in which we teach our class how to use the Wordle tool. We used the Declaration of Independence, a poem, motivational words, and song lyrics to create our Wordle. It definitely had some drawbacks because it was a little tricky to figure out and use. Wordle also would not be useful except for creating posters or aesthetically pleasing visuals for the classroom. I do not think it would have much educational use besides creating pictures teachers could use in lessons. 

This project meets the NETS•T Standard: 3. Model Digital Age Work and Learning. 

Here are some Wordles that we created for our project: 

I created this one using motivational words.

My partner created this one, which would be great for a government lesson.

My partner also made this one using names, like you could do for an elementary class.