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.

Evidence of Network Participation

My participation in this class took various forms. I learned from classmates through discussions in class. I also followed the blogs of several classmates. I have included a screencast of my replies to classmates.  Mike Carlin let me know that my podcast was not working properly and here is a screen capture of those comments. I also participated in the video discussion board seen in the screenshot below.

K-12 Wiki Lesson or Project

The K-12 wiki spaces was new to me at the start of this class. I have used this resource several times to find engaging technology lessons.I really liked the seventh grade Create Your Own Rocks activity. I chose to post my artifact excel spreadsheet and artifact analysis file.

Podcast

I am not used to listening to my own voice recording. My students love hearing their own voices, over and over and over again. The idea that the entire world could listen to me...yikes! A global audience to my 13-year old girls is exciting, engaging and motivating. I guess it is Immigrant vs. Native but I am totally on board with them, scary as it is. Podcasting could be used by students to share what they have done in school with parents. Podcasts could be placed on the school's website and students could take turns throughout the year sharing what they are doing in each subject.  In the science classroom, podcasting could be used to share observations, experimental results, or analysis. I could even see my students doing a podcast of a debate which focuses on some bio-ethical issue such as designer babies. Podcasting could also be used to "go back in time" and stand witness to some historical event as a reporter. During my unit on Earthquakes, my students create earthquake resistant buildings to test on our shake table. They could create a podcast that includes each step in the engineering process, beginning with problem identification and moving through design, testing, and redesign. The podcasts could be shared with other classes, students at other schools, structural engineers, parents, or anybody.

Here is my sample podcast.

Screencast

I used to believe that my students knew more about technology than I ever would. I now realize they only know more about social networking than I do. That being said, I think the best way to learn technology is by doing it and then trying to share it/teach it to somebody else. In the classroom, I would incorporate screencasts as a way for students to demonstrate how to use any of the Web 2.0 tools. I would first introduce several applications such as Skype, Animoto, Googledocs, Picasa, or Goanimate. Students could pair up and learn about one of the applications and then create a screencast demonstrating how that application may be used. It would be beneficial to store all the student-made screencasts and use that library of knowledge for all students, especially the younger grades. I prefer Screencast-O-Matic because it allows for clearer views of the web pages.

Here is a sample of my screencast showing how to access the Laurel homework page.

Google Earth Tour Ring of Fire

Here is my tour of the Ring of Fire


Students love Google Earth especially if you let them find their own house first! There are so many layers to this program; it could be used for any subject. I teach earth science during the first part of the school year and I made this Ring of Fire tour as an example from which my students could create a Plate Tectonic Tour. The student version would include an example of a divergent boundary, transform boundary and also a convergent boundary. Each stop would include informative links and a photograph showing associated features such as mountains, faults, volcanoes, et. I often integrate with the humanities teachers and right now they are looking at how the Western Reserve was settled. Students could use google earth to document the journey of settlers moving from New England to Ohio. They could take on the persona of a child, or adult on the journey and at each stop they could write about what they are seeing, feeling, eating, etc. They could incorporate pictures or scans of their own drawings. Perhaps they could find or create pictures of household items, wagons, dress or animals important to the journey. I think this virtual journey is a nice alternative for those students who do do not want to make a hard copy journal.