Saturday, November 26, 2011

Screen Capture with JING

As an art teacher, I am constantly giving demonstrations.  However, if a student is absent on the day of a demo I find that I either am repeating myself and the whole demo over again for one student, or that student ends up missing out on a valuable learning experience that is usually essential to the project.  For demonstrations that are given on the computer I have a new best friend called JING. 
 
The website www.jingproject.com/ provides a tool called JING that you can use for free to create multimedia presentations, complete with audio. Versions are available for both Mac and PC. To make my class more self-paced and to help students who have been absent, I am creating tutorial videos to post on my class learning management system for their access.  This will also help students be more self-sufficient if they forget how to use a tool they can reference back to my video for help instead of wasting class time waiting for me to be able to get to them one-on-one. 
 
The one downside to using JING is that the videos are limited to 5 minutes in length.  I am currently exploring other free screen capture sites and will post my findings soon.  In the meantime please feel free to visit the link below to see a tutorial I made for my photo students on how to get rid of pimples and wrinkles.
 

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Authentic Assessment

Authentic Assessment Toolbox

A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge and skills -- Jon Mueller

An authentic assessment usually includes a task for students to perform and a rubric by which their performance on the task will be evaluated.

Best E-learning Tools of 2010


Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Future of the Book

Check out this video on how e-reading is evolving!  I cannot wait to try out Alice!
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Monday, July 18, 2011

BYOT

This is a video I found from CNN about the idea of BYOT: Bring Your Own Technology.
This is a topic that my superintendant brought up in a meeting about online classes that we are going to be offering at the school next year.  It is an interesting concept.

]

Has anyone gotten this to work for them?

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Best GROUP COLLABORATION SITE!

Have you been to the website Enter The Group http://www.enterthegroup.com/  yet? 



If you are unfamiliar with this website I recommend you check it out!  I spent an hour today transferring my files and information for my theatre cast that I had spread out between e-mails, websites, Google Calendar and Facebook and created a central space where I can post polls, files, calendars, chat or e-mail members and post assignments.  It is the most comprehensive group tool I have found to date.  Oh, and did I mention it’s all FREE? :) 

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Technology to check out - Microsoft Office 365 & Live Meeting - To the Cloud



Windows Live Meeting is part of Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Lync Online software that takes advantage of cloud technology to bring people together from anywhere in the world.  In a Live Meeting presenters can upload just about anything on their computer to share (PowerPoint’s, E-mails, Spreadsheets, Videos, etc).  There are even interactive whiteboards so everyone in the meeting can write their ideas as though they were there live.

 
If there are several people in a conference room participating in the meeting, a tool called Roundtable can be purchased as a single camera/speaker/microphone system that sits in the middle of the table and projects a panoramic view of the conference room for others to see. 



The entire meeting can also be recorded for those who could not make the meeting.  This software seems to cover most everything one would need to host an online meeting or study group.  One downside is your company or school would have to have the software and a cloud setup.  I do not know the cost of the plan for schools, but for a small business it costs $6/month per user. 


Thursday, July 7, 2011

Week 3- Teachers and Facebook


This week we are talking about Facebook and where do we draw the line as teachers.  This is a debate that has been going on for a while and continues to cause heated arguments amongst people.

Some think a teacher should be fired for friending a former student who is graduated and over the age of 18.

Some teachers think its okay to friend all of their current students.

Where is the line and how do we know when we have crossed it?  Should it just be up to administrators or the school board of that particular community to decide?  Our assignment this week was to read an  Article about a teacher who was suspended after making a Facebook comment about her school.


After doing discussion posts this week, I found a great article that I have shared below that pretty much sums up how I feel about the subject. An article every educator and administrator should read

I personally believe that with Facebook, as with everything else that we do, that we just need to use some common sense and be professional about it.  I personally am not friends with students current or former on Facebook, but I still am able to utilize Facebook by communicating with students through theatre groups we have set up.  On the group page I can post links, schedules and answer student questions in a much more efficient manner than calling every student, sending passes for them or waiting until our next club meeting.  At the same time, they cannot see my profile and personal info and I cannot see theirs.

Week 2 of EDU 651 - Wiki's, blogs and twitter

So this week we learned about wiki's, blogs and twitter.  Although nowadays wiki and twitter are staples in our everyday speech I really did not know much about them until this week.  Up until now I had been content with my blog that consisted of only photos and my Facebook profile for keeping in touch with my friends.

Wiki's
Did you know that wiki is actually short for the Hawiian wiki wiki which means easy? (Richardson  55).
It turns out anyone can create a wiki about anything - like a blog.  The difference is anyone can read and write and edit a wiki. How great for class collaboration?

Twitter
I still have not quite gotten the hang of Twitter yet... It is less likely that I will use it in my class as opposed to blogs and wikis.  I think my first tweet actually was posted multiple times because I could not tell how to see if it went through or not.  I think I will need to ask some of my students to show me how they use it.  Sometimes our students or people who have grown up with more technology can come up with ideas to use it that would have never crossed my mind.



Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press. ISBN: 9781412977470

Monday, July 4, 2011

Here we go...

I have never been one for journaling or blogging... my diary has 3 year gaps between entries...sad, I know.



But the time has come to document what I know, what I am learning and ways I can use it.  I am currently getting my Masters of Arts in Teaching and Learning with Technology (I have posted a link to the program below for anyone who is interested) and there is so much information that I cannot possibly keep track of it all.  So my hope is that this blog will help me document my resources, findings and "ah ha" moments and hopefully those of you reading will gain some knowledge from my adventures.  So, here we go...

Teaching & Learning with Technology Masters Program