Week 6 Review

Today we worked on pod-casting using GarageBand. GarageBand is a fairly simple application to use. You drag and drop photos into the program, and stretch or shorten them depending on how long you need them to be. Recording is also easy, push a button and talk into your mic. Then add a background jingle to your podcast. There are many to choose from, you just drag and drop just like you would with your pictures.

Week 5 Review

This week I got a chance to help set up the white board. I have never worked with it before like this, so that was interesting. I don't like that this particular white board was set up with a projector. It makes it really hard to see!! I like the ones Ive seen that you can get in front of it, and there is no projector, so students (and you) can still see what you are doing.
We discussed the eight guidelines of media literacy, and got to make thought-provoking questions to ask the class, who answered using clickers. The clickers are awesome, and would be a lot of fun in the classroom (I don't remember their actual name).

We played with a bunch of search engines. The three popular ones; google, yahoo, and bing. As well as some new ones I've never heard of, some that don't really work, and others that just steal what the popular ones have.

Then we looked at different websites, and evaluated if they were real or fake. Most were fake. Mine looked real, but it turned out they took and copied everything from the actual website.

Week 4 Review

This week we learned about Google Earth. I have used this application before. What was new for me was being able to record a tour of places. It was very easy to do. I think this could be very useful in the classroom. You could mark places along the Oregon Trail when studying it, and similar things for other subjects you are studying in class.

Week 3 Review

I was absent this week. The class worked on making videos with iMovie.

iMovie lets you take video segments and make them into a movie. You can edit the length of the segment, add text to it, voice over it, etc. There are also different transitions you can add between each clip.

Week 2 Review

A picture is worth a thousand words. This week we discussed how pictures can be manipulated. This can happen by combining pictures together (like in tabloids).

We went over how this can be accomplished in photoshop. By combining different pictures we can trick people into believing something. For instance putting myself in front of the Eiffel tower -showing people I have been there before, when in fact I have not :(
Photoshop is not a new concept for me, I have used it a lot actually.

Week 1 Review

Today in class we discussed:
Web2.0, a website in which there is no interaction -only a static page. Web2.0 pages would be ones where you find pages with information and more links which take you to more information. The opposite being pages where you leave comments -share with others.

BigHugeLabs, "Helping you do cool stuff with your photos" -anything from making your photo a jigsaw, adding captions, borders, slide shows, etc. This site is connected with Flikr.

Go2Web20, is full of online tools and applications. You can find applications to help you with organization, play music, play games, draw, there are a lot of different choices.

And of course setting up our blog.

I think all of these mediums could be integrated and helpful in the classroom at some point.

ED 421 Day One

First day of technology class today. First post of the term. Yay! :)