End of the semester

The semester is coming to a close and I must admit this was a very educational class. When I first enrolled, I thought it was going to be boring because I was like "How much technology can she actually teach us?" Well I was surprised. There is so much technology out that I never even realized it existed. I never knew all the short tricks that you can do through word, excel, and PowerPoint. My most memorable part of class would be creating the video, I never made one before or used any of the programs and within a week we created a short clip. It was pretty exciting. I even went and told all my friends to watch it. :)

Electronic Portfolios

Our last big assignment that we had to do was the electronic portfolio to show all of our work we did over the semester. We could also add any other information that we thought would be useful. I thought the electronic portfolio was a great project especially since they are making us create one for our student teaching project. Having this portfolio will would be able to just give the interested employer the address. Also, it could be easily updated. This is a great way to show everyone what you have completed as a teacher.

Lesson Plan trick

I learned something interesting in class on Monday. It is how tab through a lesson plan you are creating. This is a great technique to make formatting lesson plans so much easier. I would always get frustrated during it before because everything would get out of place but now with the tools it will automatically brings it down to the next line. I can not wait to use this in the future with lesson plans.

Social Bookmarking

This weekend I did a project called Social Bookmarking. It is where I found websites that I thought would be beneficial for my classroom and placed them in the website called delicious (a social bookmarking website). This site will allow everyone to see what websites I thought were good to use in a classroom. Having this project made me really look into websites to see what makes a good website and what makes a bad website. There are so many websites out there that give you lesson plans, worksheets, games and even quizzes. Websites even offer video clips that you can watch as a class. This project definitely made me open my eyes to use the Internet for resources and not to start something from the beginning.

Powerpoint Lessons!

So the past week, I have been pretending to be like a student while a classmate teaches a lesson through PowerPoint. I enjoyed everyone's lesson from being in first grade counting by 5's or learning about gravity. It was a great learning experience. I must admit I learned a lot of things that I didn't know especially in the middle/high school lessons.

Creating a lesson plan with PowerPoint was somewhat difficult since we are used to the standard lesson plan format. PowerPoint is definitely a great way to get your students involved.

Seeing what you can do with PowerPoint, I can't wait to see what we learn using smartboard this week.

Copy Rights

This past week learning about copyrights was interesting. I definitely learned a lot because I never knew about some of the information we received. Copyrights is protection provided by the USA to give the authors ownership of their work. This includes literal, musical and more. A fact that I learned was about the number of years it is covered after the author has died. I just assumed the copyright stayed forever. Anyone can receive a copyright on something they created. The symbol for the copyright sign doesn't always have to be shown. I thought that was tricky because you will have to be very careful attention. In the end of the week we ended with an interactive jeopardy of copyright. It was so much fun. Even if we didn't know all the answers we still learned a lot. I feel from having the class discussions, I learned more about copyrights that I didn't know.

Movie Maker

For the last two weeks we were creating a public service announcement and I must admit it was a great experience. I never used movie maker, or any other sites before to create something and let alone put it on YouTube. I had so much fun making the video but also deleting and adding title pages, music, and a credit page. I seriously felt like a film editor on a major production. I thought this project was a great learning experience, because not only did I learn how to create a short clip, I also have a basic knowledge on how to teach my students. Having the students create a short clip will give them the experience to do something new. In this day and age, the majority of people use the computer and this is a new way to express a certain topic.
Creating a short clip will get all your students involved and participate in the project. Making a video clip, can be comical, serious, informational and more. I can't wait to be able to use movie maker in my classroom.