Glogs

I am excited to learn how people are using/plan to use glogs in their classrooms. I tried using glogs this year as an outside required reading assignment. The students enjoyed creating these, but once again passwords were a bit confusing for them. I let my students play with glogs because they had never used them before. I would like to do this again now that they are familiar with glogs.

Other Tools Assignment

I like this wiki because of the way it is organized. It will be a great place to go to remind myself of tools to use in the classroom. I like Audacity because I have used it with my students, and it was very successful. It was easy for them to understand, and it added to the assignment. It wasn't technology for technology's sake. Animoto is another one of my favorites. I haven't used it in the classroom yet, but I created my digital story using Animoto. Again, it is simple, but the result is an impressive video. I found a new tool on this wikispace as well. It's called confusing words, and it is a "collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused." I do teach "words often confused" to my students, but this seems like an excellent resource for them. I try to stress that spell-check will not catch these types of mistakes, and this resource will help my students to understand this concept.

Diigo Assignment

http://www.diigo.com/09vv0

The concept of Diigo is great, especially because students often collaborate on research assignments. However, I still think it is a little confusing. I was able to highlight, share, and annotate websites; but it took some time to figure out how to do this. I think if I supervised my students while they created their groups and practiced sharing research, then they could add websites and notes on their own. I would prefer paper and a highlighter for my own research, but I think they would like Diigo better.

Diigo Assignment

Jennifer taught my students how to use Diigo this year. They think it is a great tool, but I didn't notice many of them using it for their projects. I like the concept a lot, but I am still struggling with it a bit. For example, I just tried to join the group for this class, but I am not able to share my bookmarks with the group. It seems like Diigo will be like most new things with technology: confusing at first, but it will eventually make things much easier. I remember when I thought email was confusing! So, I will continue to work on sharing my bookmarks with the group this week. I will reflect on the process after I am able to do this.

Digital Story

Last week I created a digital story in Animoto and embedded it into my blog. Animoto is actually extremely easy to use, and the videos that it automatically creates look great. However, even though my video is only about thirty seconds, it took a long time to create it. The problem was that the pictures I tried to upload were too large. I finally figured out that I had to resize the images in order to speed up the uploading process. I downloaded a program that allowed me to do this. So, even though my video looks simple, it actually represents about an hour of work. In the future, I could create videos like this in a few minutes. The key is resizing the images in advance. I still don't know how to save this video into the public folder. I understand how to access this folder, but I can't figure out how to save videos in Animoto. Has anyone done this before? I created a digital story in iMovie a few years ago, and I have always loved the concept. I wanted to try Animoto because Nancy Bisbe introduced this program earlier in the year. It seemed like something that junior high students would easily understand. The problem with it is that you have to pay for videos that are over thirty seconds. I think it would be fun for students to create videos for novels with Animoto. They could select music, quotes from their books, and images that represent themes and concepts from the reading. I may use this for an outside required reading assignment fourth quarter. I know they would enjoy it.

Digital Story

I created this in Animoto:

Project #2

The students worked in Audacity this week, and it was successful! However, we encountered some problems along the way. I wanted the students to save their recorded essays in the public webcast folder, but they were not able to do this. We couldn't figure out why the students weren't able to save here, but I learned that they can save to the student folder. Most of the students were motivated to finish their essays, so they could record them in Audacity. I had a few problems with microphones and sound, but I expected that. One issue with an assignment like this is making sure students have access to microphones. I offered this during class, homeroom, lunch, and before and after school. We will play these recordings in class on Monday. I'm looking forward to listening to them.