TPTE - Overall

I was not sure what to expect with this class, I heard many horror stories. I didn't think that after this semester I was going to be turned on to Mac's because I have always said I would never use them. I haven't  used any of the different technology projects that we have used in here before. It was a great experience to learn different strategies for the classroom even if I didn't enjoy them all. 


I am really glad that we have to take this class, because I felt that I have actually learned. Usually with other classes I come away without anything that I will actually use. I have already taken all of this into the classroom with me at TSD and showed the kids what I have been working with. 


I do not say this much but I think that I have actually grown from this class and will continue to use what I have learned to make my classroom more exciting and involved in technology.

Classroom Website

This was a fun project for me. I feel that I will really use this in the classroom. The only thing that gets me is what happens if there are a lot of low income families that do not have a computer or easy access to a computer...how to I let them know its there without making them feel bad or that I am not trying to reach out to them? Do I only use it when I am in the classroom with the students and if I were at the deaf school the cottage staff (the kids live in cottages on campus if they are from far away and they have staff that act as guardians to the children) to use with the students when doing homework.


I feel that at first you look at this whole task and thought that it was going to be crazy hard, but once you got a few pages created and learned your way around the site it was easy!


I created a new classroom blog and added a bunch of pictures to my website, so that it was more interesting. I added all of the projects that I have created this semester, this way I will have them all for the future. I made a daily schedule and a reading list for parents to look at. There are also all the websites that we have found all semester that can help students and parents with different subjects. 


Overall this was a nice way to sum up all of our work this semester in one last project. 

Digital Story - Camp Koinonia

This was my FAVORITE project! I had a little bit of a problem at first picking what I wanted to make a project on. Then I thought about camp. This is something that is not only important to me...but also to my mom! 


My mom went to Camp Koinonia in 1980 with Doc (my same teacher) at Virginia Tech. Then when I moved to Tennessee I saw this class and signed up for it without knowing it was the same class. My mom and I were talking about my schedule and I said I was taking Camp K-Something...she pulled out her shirt and it was the same class! 


I have done camp two years in a row now and last year I was a head counselor for Me Hearties. I was the best experience of my life. I wish that I had time to do it this year, but since I am graduating in May there is no time. 


I really liked how easy it was to pull the pictures into iMovie and use iTunes to pick my songs. The only thing that bothered me was that we could only use 30 seconds of a song. I wish that we could have used them for a longer time. 


I cannot wait to use this in my classroom. I want to be able to make one for the first day of class, so that I can show my students who I am and then I can have them make one about themselves. I think that this is a great way to bring technology into the classroom. I love creative projects and this isn't very complicated so it would be easy for students to do. 


Once I got the hang of how to put the music it was easy. The hardest part was waiting for the video to export. I am not a patient person when it comes to that stuff! 


But I hope you enjoy and get a feeling about what this camp experience is like :) 

Spreedsheets- Excel

This has been my least favorite project yet. I don't think that I will ever use this in my classroom EVER. It was not fun to make, and I don't think that I would like to do a quiz like this in my class. It is an interesting idea to have them use the computers for this kind of test, but all it did was frustrate me.

 I used my idea with the planets again, to go along with what we are working on in the deaf school. I ran into the problem of having to double up on planets because you needed to have ten questions and there are only eight planets now. I think another thing that I would have to do for the kids that I work with would be adding a word bank. Spelling can be hard and not getting it perfect would cause them to get a wrong answer. I don't like the fact that the spreed sheet is only one page and it was hard to get a good picture on it that wasn't too small. 

Overall the instructions we easy to follow it was just a lot of going in a unlocking then locking and hiding and protecting and if something didn't work right you have to go back in again. I never knew that you could lock a spreadsheet so that the next person to look at it couldn't change it, but what is preventing a child that knows how to do that from unlocking it? I guess that would be where you would need the password. 

I hated having to merge the cells and then work on putting the writing up at the top and not the bottom, it was a lot more editing then I would like to use. I like tools that are easy and to the point. It is good that I know how to do this, but having to do this over and over along with all the other planning would drive me insane! It was a good learning experience. 

Inspiration Project- Inner Planets

This was my Inspiration Project- I am volunteering at Tennessee School for the Deaf this semester in a science classroom and we are working on the planets so I thought this was a great time for me to learn more and base this project on them. 

I really liked Inspiration but the one downfall is that you have to buy the program to work on it at home or away from the lab, which I don't like. I like to work on things at home- when I can really focus and not being able to do that really stressed me out. 

The program is not hard to navigate around, all the information that you need is at the top in the tool box. It took some time to figure out where to click to add a new bubble off of the one I wanted it off of. I also kept clicking on the arrange button thinking that it would arrange them close to what I wanted but it really moved them and I had to start all over so you could see all the linking words. Changing the font and colors were easy- I chose something that looked more like the night sky with all the planets in it. I also attached the last four planets that Trisha talked about. (there is a link to her blog later!) 

I was worried at first I was going to have to find all the different pictures of the planets but Inspiration had them under 'Science' and then 'Space.' This was really helpful, because they were all the sized right, and they didn't have a background that I would have to worry about. 

I like the notes, I was able to add extra information and then those could hid- but I left them up in the picture so that everyone can see what information I added. We also had to use a link, so my main title, "Inner Planets" links to a NASA site, that allows the students to read more about all the planets. There are questions and other facts about the planets in a kid friendly way. 

Trisha Wall and I split up the planets and she did the outer ones. This way if we were team teaching one of us could go through the first four and then the other would go through the last four. This is Trisha's Inspiration that would be  taught after we went through the inner planets. 

They show the connection to each other by having the planets that are next or the planets that were already covered. 

Deaf Ed Project

Interview Presentation on Prezi

I was using this to keep track of my project just incase it didn't work in class I had it on my blog! But I learned how to do this from this class...so I figured that I would keep it up here! This was my second time doing this and it keeps getting easier. I has some problems with how to get it started in class but that maybe because it was on a computer that I am not used to using?! 

Extra Credit - SmileBox

I decided to use SmileBox instead of Animoto, because I think 30 seconds is too short of a time for the movie. I want to work with elementary school kids and this would be a great activity to make about their family. This can help them develop family vocabulary. They can take pictures of everyone and then put the words with them when we print it out, we can also add pictures of the signs so they can see them over and over. We can make a classroom scrapbook with posts like this of different things that we have learned. This allows the students to be creative and use technology and learn.

Here is one of mine of random pictures from this summer, I have some of my dad and my mom and my friends and at the Capital back home!! Things that are important to me. That would also be a great introduction activity for the students to learn about each other and things that they like. This can help as an ice breaker and create new friendships for things they didn't know they had in common.  This can also be neat to show parents on back to school night as a collection of our work. We can make them for field trips and then type up different stories of what the children saw or experienced. That can help with writing.

This picture collage generated with Smilebox

Here is another one!! that I did on Camp Koinonia 2010! and my cabin group :) The Me Hearties!!! This shows about the different activities that we did and how we dressed up. I really LOVE LOVE LOVE this web 2.0 tool!! I am going to use this myself!! I think that I am going to ask my parents to pay for this for me so that I can print them or save them on a disk and take them to CVS and get them printed out and framed!! I think I am going to use this for Christmas cards this year too :) 


I really like how when you preview them off the blog, you can have music and then you can click on the individual pictures to in large them.