Multimedia Website

This final project took quite some time to accomplish. The learning curve was straight uphill for me, but now all I can think is how great it would be to make a website with all the bells and whistles. The free website on weebly.com is fine but it would be better with video, student pod casts and a student Google Earth link. The most challenging piece of this was conceptualizing how a website works and how students would navigate through it.  This is something I will most certainly give more thought to as I move forward in my tech education. Uploading files was also a challenge at times. You cannot upload a document with an embedded picture.  I really want my students to make websites now. I am thinking about using this means as a form of assessment. Students  really connect with the ethics piece of this unit and students could work in small groups or individually to create a website which raises awareness of conservation issues.

Here is the link to my website

Laurel School Class Trip Video

I have chosen not to post this video to protect the privacy of my students
 
This video will serve as an example from which future classes can create their own trip videos. The students could be grouped by district (Theater, Gateway, North Coast, Government) and a series of videos could be produced. Our class trip serves as a springboard from which students learn about the past, present and future of Cleveland. The curriculum aligns with grades 6-8 social studies benchmarks (economics, citizenship, rights, responsibilities) and grade 7 content standards in geography (location, places and regions, human environmental interaction and movement). 

The making of this video was challenging. I scrapped the tripod five minutes into the trip because I needed to attend to students; consequently, some frames are a bit shaky. I used a Flip video recorder which was easy. The challenge came when trying to get windows movie maker to recognize the flip files (MP4). Ultimately I found a free converter to solve the problem. The Flip video movie maker is not as versatile as windows movie maker so I really had to do that. Much of my storyboard went out the window too. What was I thinking with all that narrative? The sound recorded while taking the video sometimes competes with my narration. I played with the volume of the narration but that did not solve the problem completely. Making this video has given me the confidence to teach my students how to do it but I think I need to learn some Mac software as well.