Week 4 of CEdO530 Digital Storytelling

This week has brought some wonderful new tools. We explored how to make a Prezi and worked on the storyboard for our Pecha Kucha.

I found the Prezi to be very fun to work with! It was easy to learn about and also easy to format. I think that this could be a different way to create presentations, both for me and for my students. I think that many of my students get tired of viewing PowerPoint presentations and also creating them. Using Prezi would be a fun way for them to present in the classroom.

We also created a storyboard for our Pecha Kucha. I chose to do my Pecha Kucha on the many vacations I have taken in my life. So far, my biggest challenge has been choosing which pictures to use. As I was working on the storyboard I was remembering some trips I had forgotten I had taken as an adult! I should be able to remember the more recent ones, but I guess not!

We also finished the Presentation Zen book. This book has given me a lot to think about. I have learned how to simplify my presentations, better plan my presentations, and make my delivery more effective. Often I feel like I have lost my students during class because of an ineffective presentation. Hopefully I can improve those presentations and keep the focus of my students.

Week 3 CEdO530 Digital Storytelling

This week we had a lot of different things to look at. We are working on redoing a presentation to make it more "zen," animoto, and pecha kucha.

I still am enjoying our book Presentation Zen. The ideas we read about this week will be very helpful in redoing my presentation. One thing that really caught my eye in this chapter was about empty space. This is something that I discuss with my yearbook class. Those students typically think they need to fill every inch of space on the page. I inadvertently thought about this with presentations. After viewing many student presentations, I have realized what distracts viewers, therefore learning what not to do in a presentation. Obviously, I don't know it all when it comes to creating effective presentations, but this was at least one thing I knew about.

I enjoyed using animoto. I found this sited very easy to work with, since there is very little technologically that I have to do. Simply choose a format for the video, upload photos, organize them, add text, choose music, and animoto does the rest. I created a video that could be used to introduce myself to new students.

Pecha kucha is an interesting concept, 20x20. 20 slides for 20 seconds each. A concept that could be very challenging for me! I am a fast talker, even my dad has to tell me to slow down. Timing will be everything for me in creating a pecha kucha. I have come up with three options for my pecha kucha:  vacations, pets, and evolution of my music tastes. Each of them would allow me to have ample information. My parents always took us on family vacations, insisting that it was important for us to see things, experience our country, and spend time together. Some of my favorite memories are from family vacations. As a child, we only had one pet, but now I have three. I have also had some others a long the way to my life now, i.e. two raccoons, roommate's pets. All have had an effect on my life and make, or have made, my life more interesting.

CEdO530 Digital Storytelling Week 2

This week entailed a lot of different things in Digital Storytelling. Much of my time was spent investigating Voicethread. Voicethread is one way to create a digital story. Images and videos can be uploaded and the author can add voice to the images. Other users can comment on the voicethreads either with voice, typed in comments or video. We were asked to create a voicethread about civil rights. I enjoyed the experience of creating a voicethread. Am I an expert after creating one voicethread? Not even close! But I would like to spend more time with this to hone my skills and create effective voicethreads.

At this point I'm struggling to find a way to incorporate digital storytelling into my classroom. I can see using voicethread as a means for student participation. Students who don't necessarily feel comfortable speaking up in class could participate online. Also, voicethread could be used when a substitute is in the classroom.....as long as the teacher can plan that far ahead! At this point I will have to do some thinking about how to incorporate it into student assignments.

I am continuing to enjoy taking pictures for posterous. It is fun to see my creative side come out. I've never considered myself a creative person, so this has my juices flowing!

Digital Storytelling, Week 1 of CEdO530

Well, I must say I am quite excited for this class! I am really looking forward to finding out about ways to improve and enhance some of the presentations that I use in my classroom. I realize that some of my presentations are not the most exciting for my students. Improving those presentations could keep more students interested in the material being covered and would increase the amount of information being retained by the students.

So far, I am having a blast taking pictures and posting them! I am looking forward to the final project that we will be doing with the pictures.

It took some time to find three different stories to watch. The stories I found were short, all less than four minutes. However, despite their shortness, they conveyed emotion, peaked my interest, and answered my questions. These are all things important to telling a story. Hopefully, I will be able to create some stories just as effective.

Conclusion of 525

This was the final week of CEdO525 and we learned about different ways to improve our lessons through the technologies we've been learning about.
During our six weeks, we looked at several different learning strategies and discussed how to implement them using technology. Providing students with feedback and recognition is very important to the learning experience. During week 2, we were required to review rubric generators and I particularly liked Rubistar. I found this website to be very easy to use. I was able to create a rubric from their database of products. The site allows the user to change points offered and choose their own categories for evaluating the assignment. The category description may be changed and the criteria may be manipulated for each category to suit the user. Using a rubric is a great way for students to know exactly what the teacher is expecting and for the teacher to clearly explain what the student did correctly or incorrectly. I also have implemented Google docs into one of my classes in order to communicate with students effectively.

I especially enjoyed learning more about nonlinguistic representation and advance organizers. Personally, I am not the type of learner who can imagine what something will look like. I also benefit from having some sort of visual that will help me remember information, so learning more about implementing nonlinguistic representation and advance organizers was beneficial to me. When reviewing different types of online advance organizers, I liked the printable organizers provided by Education Oasis. Education Oasis had several types of maps available, however, they were in pdf format and couldn't be saved or changed for the user's specifications. Using any kind of map to organize ideas can be useful to students.

Our final project was to improve a current lesson or unit by incorporating technology and learning strategies. I am always looking for different ways to improve my lessons and to better engage students. I found many ways to improve the unit I reviewed, which is helpful considering we started the unit immediately following me reviewing my unit. I plan to incorporate many of the things that we discussed in class and see if there is any improvement in the students.

Week 5 of 525

What questions do I have about using technology to generate and test hypotheses in my classroom?

I teach business and there are not many times that I expect my students to generate and test hypotheses. In some of my classes students will predict what will happen, but it is difficult to test theories when business is pretty black and white. So, I guess since I find it difficult to hypothesize in my classroom it is difficult to think about what technologies could be used.

What kind of technologies can I use to help students identify similarities and differences?

I do this often in my Personal Finance class. Just recently we compared banks and credit unions, debit cards and credit cards. In the past we have compared saving and investing. When doing this I encourage the students to use a graphic organizer to sort out their thoughts. It is very easy to use Microsoft Word to create a Venn Diagram to use.

What kind of technologies can I use to help students with homework and practice?

I have had students use many different technologies for homework and practice. Often I use spreadsheets in accounting for financial statements, journalizing, posting, and creating a worksheet. I also use spreadsheets in Personal Finance when the students are creating a budget. First, we create a budget together in class and then they are expected to create a similar budget for themselves. Currently, in my Entrepreneurship class, students are  creating a new cereal. They create a new box and design a magazine ad and television commercial. The students are using goanimate or xtranormal for their television commercials and Microsoft Publisher for their magazine ads. The Entrepreneurship students are also using Google docs for many of their assignments.

Cooperative Learning and Reinforcing Effort

This week in 525, we focused on cooperative learning and reinforcing effort.

What is the purpose of asking students to work cooperatively?
Cooperative learning can be a very powerful tool to use in the classroom. Students get the opportunity to work with others and share ideas and talents. It is important for students to learn to work with others that they may not be comfortable working with, since that would most likely happen when they are adults in the workplace.
Our first task was to explore It's a Wild Ride! This project is an interdisciplinary project where students work together to create a new roller coaster ride for an amusement park. The project incorporates the four main content areas throughout the different phases. While I think this is a great project, I am a bit surprised that other content areas weren't considered. Tech ed standards could be considered for the engineering of the roller coaster and business ed could be considered to help market the roller coaster. (But, I guess that is just me being biased to my teaching area!) Overall, the project seems to incorporate many important ideas. The students are working together, several content areas are linked together to answer the student question of "When am I ever going to use this in my life?", and it gives the students clear guidelines to follow.

Next, we had to watch two videos by Clay Shirky, Institutions vs. collaboration and How cognitive surplus will change the world. In the first video, Clay was talking about people collaborating via the internet and used the example of Flickr. His point showed how collaboration typically works, in my opinion, especially when high school students are involved. It showed how one person typically contributes the most work and the other collaborators differ in how much they contribute. I see this often when my students are doing group projects. The second video discussed how cognitive surplus is used. Clay told us that cognitive surplus is the ability for the world's population to volunteer, contribute, and collaborate on large, and sometimes, global projects. There are two things that make up cognitive surplus:  the world's free time and talents and media tools that allow more than consuming, they allow creation and sharing as well. Cognitive surplus can be a powerful tool for students. Technology will allow them to increase their "surplus" of knowledge and also share their knowledge.