Preparation for First Major Project

For my first major project in this class, the integrated technology lesson plan, I am planning on using digital story technology for an elementary social studies lesson plan. I am planning on having students make their own personal time line using a program like PhotoPeach to use pictures from their lives growing up and their own life experiences to explain in the text portion of the slide show, how they grew up. My content goals will be to have students learn about a new free digital story technology, what a time line is, and how time lines differ depending on the events that are a part of the spectrum. This technology goes well with the content I would like to teach because it allows students to use copies of their photos instead of the originals. The technology is also free and can be saved on the PhotoPeach website and worked on at school, the public library, or any computer the student has access to. The technology also gives the students the creative freedom to set up the digital sideshow, pictures, text, and audio however they want to get the goal of the assignment accomplished. Some misconceptions that the students may have about the technology is that the technology is hard to use, costly, and it will hard for the entire class/teacher to see the finished project. When in fact if I held a PhotoPeach learning session in the school's computer lab, I would show my students how it is easy to use, that the programs is free, and how sharing/viewing the finished projects is very easy to do.

A Tour of the Harry Potter Park on PhotoPeach



I used PhotoPeach Slideshare and photos from my own Mac Iphoto to make a slideshow of my trip to the Harry Potter Park last year. When I went to the park it had only been open for 63 days!! In the slideshow the text portrays the speaker as a tour guide for the park. I thought my slideshow would be useful for my teaching because, I could use it in two ways. One way I could use the slideshow is as a treat to my students, like if they are good then I will show them my slideshow of a trip their teacher took once. Or I could make a lesson using a digital slideshow, where I first show my slideshow, and then tell my students that I want them to pick an event, trip, or place they have been to and make a slideshow using pictures from their personal database. The students would become “tour guides” to their personal event, trip, or place, and will explain or give tips in every slide as to what there is to do in the destination they have chosen to talk about. A digital story slide show might be useful for students to do story telling this way because they can personalize their story using their own personal photos/experiences. Students will also feel satisfaction that a project they made on the computer is able to be projected on the screen in class for classmates to see, or can be embedded in a blog so that parents can see the work a student made in school. Digital stories can also be worked on in class at the school computer lab or finished up at home on the student’s personal computer because all of the information is on a website. Also digital story telling can be useful because students do not have to take the project apart like other previous photo projects (such as putting the photos back into the photo album) because the digital stories just use copies of the photos versus the actual photos.
When it comes to talking about my likes/dislikes about PhotoPeach Slideshare, I have to say that I really loved the technology. With PhotoPeach you can upload pictures straight from you laptop’s photo database and do not have to go through the extra step of uploading your pictures to a Flikr like database. Also PhotoPeach allows you to add music by searching Youtube for songs and instrumentals to use so that you have more of a range of songs to choose from rather than the tunes they provide. PhotoPeach also has a page where you can very easily put the photos in the correct order and add text in different formats to each slide. After you have finished the slide show PhotoPeach is also very easy when it comes to publishing and sharing your slideshow. There are icons at the side of the slideshow that offer step-by-step ways to share your slideshow on twitter, myspace, facebook, e-mail, and others online communications. PhotoPeach also allows you to make your slideshow public on the PhotoPeach website so other members can view your work! The only thing I did not like about PhotoPeach was that it automatically saved your work versus there being a save button for the user to manually save work. Personally I just feel more safe if there is a save button there for me to hit.

Week 5 New technology Google Earth

The newest version of Google Earth is really amazing. GoogleEarth is an online program that allows the user to visually search any place in the world and to see this destination in real life photography taken from satellites in space. The program is like a photographic GPS that you can use for any place in the world. Using the search engine you can type in any city, any address or destination and GoogleEarth will take you there! There is also a street view option on GoogleEarth where the satellite image can maneuvered so the user can literally walk the streets of the destination they have chosen. GoogleEarth also has an app for smart phones which is great for when the user is actually in the destination they have chosen because then they can instantly maneuver their way through a new town or city. GoogleEarth also has navigation tools such as a compass and the ability to zoom in or zoom out for the user to get their bearings as to the layout of the destination. The fact that GoogleEarth is 3D is also great because the visuals offer a more realistic view of what the terrain looks like. GoogleEarth is much more efficient and useful than traditional methods of people finding out about a travel destination before they decide to go. I remember my mom calling a hotel in a certain area we were going for vacation and asking them to send her information on the attractions in the area. My mom would also buy traveling guides and videos to places like Disneyworld because they offered tips like how far away good hotels were, where to eat, park your car, etc. Now with GoogleEarth finding this information is free, with no phone calls, and you do not even need to leave your house. A limitation that GoogleEarth has is that it does not give detailed information about the places the user is viewing on the screen. I think GoogleEarth could be improved by offering hyperlinks to things such as hotel websites, restaurant menus, etc. This way a user can learn a lot more about the area they are researching before they get there!
GoogleEarth can also be used in lesson plans for students to learn about other countries, cities, etc. The students will be able to find out things such as the terrain, climate, whether area is rural, urban, developed, or underdeveloped. Students will find the program easy to use and will have fun searching things such as their own address.
Lastly, another limitation I saw with GoogleEarth is when I put in my own address I only saw an empty lot instead of my house. My parents house is less than 10 years old so I can tell that this is an old picture, so I also think that GoogleEarth needs to update their satellite images more often because the earth's terrain change a lot in less than 10 years.

Random Pic from Flikrrr

By Jeferonix
I chose this random picture from Flikr because I like cats and technology. I can see me using this as a screen saver in my classroom to show my personality when it comes to animals and technology.

My Copyright from Creative Commons

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Wow the copyright lab had a lot of information to read! But some interesting things I did found out from the reading were you can really copyright anything you create such as pantomimes and choreography! I also found that ideas are not copyrightable so if you think of something you believe is unique u should video it, perform it, take a photo of it, or write it down, or an idea you have could be stolen or just a very similar idea could be copyrighted before you get the chance to. Another thing I learned from the copyright lab was that once you have a copyright to your idea it is not forever. In fact Copyrights made after 1977 only last + 70 years after the author's death. Another important point I found in the copyright lab was the idea of Fair Use. Fair Use allows the public to use portions of copyrighted work without permission from the copyright owner. When disputes occur over plagiarism/copyrighting the courts look at these factors to decide whether an offense has occurred:
1. The purpose and character of the second use: Is it just a copy, or are you doing something different from the original work? Is your use commercial?
2. The nature of the original: Was the original work creative or primarily factual?
3. Amount used: How much of the original work was used, and was that amount necessary?
4. Effect: Did the use harm the market for the original work? For example, would people buy this work instead of the original?
In conclusion what our teacher said in class about pretty much everything is OK to use for educational purposes EXCEPT Disney is a good rule of thumb, and I'm glad I now understand the online laws when it comes to copying things.

Flikr Slideshow

This is my dog Coota, wearing my sunglasses. I took it last summer after a walk we took together. He was so tired!

SO FAR: Delicious is hard and Twitter is dumb

In making a delicious and twitter accounts, I really don’t see YET how I could make these useful in the classroom. I can see myself looking at other teacher’s or co-workers really stuffed delicious feeds/tags for good worksheets, lesson plans, fieldtrips, recipes, etc. But I cannot see myself, wanting to take the time to make a good or attractive delicious account that other people would want to see. I think the reason I say this is because I don’t really yet know how to use my delicious account correctly. I mean I see the square on my web browser and the button on the tool bar at the very top of my screen, but I still don’t think this technology is simple enough for me to want to use in my teaching.
With twitter, right now, I think it is dumb. I can only see using it in the classroom to tweet to parents a general tweet like “today my first graders are excelling in their math lesson, I am so psyched!” But really I would rather use a blog to digitally to give a detailed journal of my classroom than write a short blurb that doesn’t really tell the entire story on twitter. I really don’t think that I would allow any of the K-5th grade students to use twitter because I can see fourth graders sneaking out with cell phones and tweeting in the bathrooms or during class when I am not looking. Like face book, twitter right now just seems to me to be another social network. So I would not yet call twitter a teacher or student learning tool. I guess a general strength with twitter is that it causes a person to just post the main point of their argument/feelings in an instant. Also the fact that twitter is public (meaning I think you can follow anyone you want), gets the information out to a lot of people all around the world. A weakness that I see with twitter is that it can be used as a distraction in class. When students tweet on their cell phones during class, and the fact that students can have the freedom to post inappropriate material or language on twitter accounts that the public can see. When it comes to learning curves, I feel that twitter is much easier to use and operate than delicious. From talking to my PLN, I feel that more people use twitter than delicious in their technology explorations, and that more people I know, find twitter more useful than delicious.

Post 3: bLoGs

I also made a blog for CEP this week on Blogger.com. With the blogs I can see making a class blog that is like a teacher diary for each school day. I will not bash my students or say 'god I had a horrible day and these students suck', but I could say daily what the students are working on, what new subjects are going to be introduced, and any kind of activities the class and the school are going to be having for the coming week. Parents would also be able to have access to the blog from home, work, or at a library. Parents could also make comments with questions that I could respond to. I also believe that my first graders could make their own blogs chronicling their school days and it could be like an online journal for them. The strength with blogging is parents do not have find the time to call me (the teacher) at a convenient time for everyone involved to ask questions. With a class blog, parents can simply type a question/comment into the blog at 3 am if they needed to. Also, for efficiency, I can have all my parent’s questions and my responses in one public format, so that if multiple parents have the same question they may be able to find it in the post/comment news feed before having to ask me and wait for a response. The only weaknesses I can see with the 'class blog' is that with the public format of the comments a parent/student can write whatever they want in the comment box. A parent could talk about a personal issues on the public blog, bash me or my teaching abilities, or a student could get onto the blog and write inappropriate content in the comment area that would be public to everyone following the blog, under their parent’s name (kids will be kids). Lastly when it comes to blogs I feel that if I helped all of the students set one up and then gave time during computer lab to journal about school or a prompt I gave them, I think that students would be able to master the technology of blogging. Also I feel that if I sent home a paper format telling how to get parents logged on to the blog, I could get parents to start blogging as well. Furthermore, I would need give a lesson on ‘appropriate blog content’ to my students, just so they know the boundaries.

Post 2: Weebly webpages

This week I made a Weebly webpage, made a new blog for this class, and I signed up for a delicious and twitter account. The website I think will be a great teacher tool because I can have a class website with assignment instructions, I could save paper by putting up weekly newsletters on my website, and I could profile our classroom activities on the site. The website could be used at my grade level but I think I would use the website as more of teaching tool and a parent's reference tool. For students I would make a class website and use the computer how to show students how to make one and how I will upload their work so that parents can see at home on the their personal computers what students are doing in my class. I think it may be too difficult to have first graders make ones their own, but if I show them how easy it is to post their work, they may be less intimated to make a website later on in upper grades. The strengths of having a website is that it saves paper, and parent's can 24 hour access to the website if they lose the newsletters, don’t understand their student’s homework, etc. The only weakness I see is the same weakness I see for all of the technology I have learned about this week in that, if parents do not have a home computer or are close to a library, they will not have access to the technology. Lastly, with webpages when it comes to access and student learning curves, I think the idea I mentioned above where I show the students how to use the webpage on a teacher workstation, in the school’s computer lab, they will be able to help their parents access the webpage at home. Also I can send home a paper step-by-step letter as to how to access the class website to the parents.