Challenge-based/Prezi Reflection

I absolutely LOVE Prezi! Compared to PowerPoint, I am vote Prezi. I really think it is much more efficient and I think it would engage students so much more. Even I was much more engaged when we did our class presentations on Prezi, so I know students would be. I like how everything can be easily added and modified when it's put into Prezi. You can change the size of things and rearrange the order which is something that cannot necessarily be done the same way in PowerPoint. I am making it a personal goal to use Prezi for presenting information at least once when I become a teacher. Hopefully it turns into something I use quite often!

Using Comics Reflection

I really enjoyed creating the online comic from toondoo. It was kind of difficult at first to figure out how to work all of the tools. I kind of had to settle for some of the things I wrote with the pencil tool because I tried repeatedly to do make it perfect and more readable but it still didn't work. Although some of the tools were difficult to use, I think students would love this! I don't think I would use it as a teacher as much as I would allow the students to use it for projects and other things.

Podcast Reflection #12

The tech chicks are so helpful! This podcast gave many resources for teachers to use to stay organized and to use in the classroom for free. They talked about the use of videos for both teachers to show and for students to create. There were a few sites they mentioned that are free for teachers to use which is what I’m all about. There are lots of resources I would love to use but we all know how limited a teacher’s budget is so free resources are the best. This podcast also talked about using tutorial videos for students to watch instead of or in conjunction with giving directions for things. This would be a perfect example of accommodating students who may need visual and/ or auditory directions. Another great thing about tutorial videos is one can stop, rewind, fast-forward, etc. as much as they need!

Podcast Reflection #11

This podcast was an interview with a teacher in Australia who uses technology in her classroom very often. This teacher spoke about digital story-telling and how she has been able to use it in her classroom. Not only does digital story-telling help engage all types of students because of its non-traditional story-telling, but for students who have trouble reading written words it helps them understand the story. She also said that kids who come to her school from other speaking countries find digital story-telling beneficial because they can better understand what is going on than if they were to have to read stories in a language not of their own. I thought a lot about this and realized how great it would be or those students who were in need of these types of modifications. I plan to use digital story-telling for students in my classroom who have trouble reading whether because they are from a different country or not.

Podcast Reflection #10

I have always heard of websites you can use that will save videos to your computer so that you can just open them up off of your computer rather than having to go to the actual videos website. For example, if a teacher wanted to use lots of videos from YouTube, they could use a certain website or software to be able to save those videos to their computer. One of the software’s talked about in this podcast is MPEG Streamclip. This software also allows people to trim videos so that they are shorter. This would be beneficial because sometimes videos I have found are way too long to actually use in the class and then you have to worry about starting and stopping the video where you want it to be at. Another benefit is that some schools block YouTube or other video sites, so by using this software you can save the videos to your computer and be able to use them.

Podcast Reflection #9

This podcast, EdTechTalk, spoke about twitter and how some schools are making teachers use twitter. Dave Cormier said that schools are literally forcing their teachers to do use twitter and I definitely do not agree with that. I am not against twitter and I do check my twitter every so often, but I do not see how or why teachers would really make use of it. I would be extremely curious to hear why schools truly believe every single teacher should use twitter and to see if they know stuff about twitter that I don’t. I don’t see how teachers using twitter would be that beneficial to students. I could see teachers using it as reminders for students but that it about it.