Monday, April 27, 2009

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.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

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.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

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.