ICT...it has been fun.

Well this is my last blog post as required by my class assignment  and I honestly don't know how to sum up this semester. I do feel like I have learned a lot.  Blogging has been an interesting experience, and as I have mentioned before it will be a useful experience for my upcoming placement. Honestly one of the most significant things to happen to me was getting an Iphone 5 in January. I finally gave into the pressure, and I am glad that I did. Everyone made fun of my sad little red phone, that was covered in scratches and barely worked. It was fine for a long time, it was a phone, and I could text on it, I could also drop it kick it and lose it and it would not matter. However, I guess I need to move with the times, and I felt weird seeing my grade 7 kids with nicer phones than me. But seriously it is awesome, I love it. I am using it for everything. I have all of my class notes on it using Evernote, I use twitter more, my schedule, Instagram, and I can keep up with my reading wherever I am. But enough about my phone.
This class has been my favorite class this semester, I feel like I have learned so many useful things while at the same time, never feeling to stressed about it. The set up of this course allows a lot of growth, without being intimidating. It has encouraged me to be creative, and has given me information that I feel is relevant and meaningful to my career.

Blogging

Classes are winding down and we are all getting ready for student teaching. It feels like a crazy mess as we are all trying to put together our final projects. For this practicum I will be teaching in a grade 9, 10 and 12 english class. My co-operating teacher is a very technologically savvy person, which is something I am really excited about. She has a class website, she blogs, and she has a class twitter account. This upcoming placement has got me really excited, nervous  and thankful for my ICT class that I had this semester. I would have otherwise felt a little bit lost going into her classroom. I think that this will be a great experience for me, I don't feel that I am that good at blogging yet, the whole thing still feels awkward, I am also just starting to get into twitter and all of these other things social media tools that can be used in the classroom. Hopefully I will continue to blog, and maybe share some of what I learn with my class mates.
If anyone is interesting in checking our her website you can go to this link!
http://cre8tivehavoc.blogspot.ca/

Movie Making: Daydreaming

This past week myself and a few of my classmates made a movie for our class assignment. We struggled for a while trying to decide what we were doing. We threw around a few ideas and at first we wanted to do a motivational video, with the theme of "why teach." We had some really inspirational ideas, but when it came down to it, none of us wanted to talk on camera...so that idea was out. For our next idea we wanted to come up with something that had more movement and we could film in multiple locations, but also related to school. We came up with the idea of daydreaming, which is something we all do in class even if we have good intentions. This was a fun way for all of us to be a part of the video. We had four students and one teacher, and excluding the teacher we each had our own dream sequence. Once we had finished filming we took all the video clips taken on my Iphone, and put them into Imovie. After using Imovie for my digital story, I had some experience and was now comfortable with it. As a group we worked with Imovie, putting all the clips together, we also looked for music for each dream scene. Even though some of my group mates didn't have a mac, they were able to learn how Imovie worked and how easy it can be to put together a short movie.
Creating little movies is fun and creative way to get our students excited about learning. Many kids are already making their own videos on youtube, so this is a way to help engage our students, and use technology to get them involved, and working together.

Here is our movie!

Digital Story! Viggo the Vegan

Creating a digital story has been an interesting challenge for me. The first challenge I had to overcome was deciding which platforms to use. There are so many to choose from, I was debating using imovie, slideshare, or powerpoint. Then I had to figure out what I was going to use for audio recording, and how I was going to put it all together. 

For the visual aspect of the story, I needed to decide what types of images I was going to use and how I wanted it to look. I wanted to use illustrations, but I am not an artist, so I needed to find one that was willing to let me use their work. I created an account on a website called “storybird,” (www.storybird.com) this is a website that creates a platform for you to write your own story. It has artwork that has been added by many different artists that have given their approval for the use of their artwork. This is how I found the inspiration for my story. Looking through the many photos I found some artwork of a leopard who looked like he might be a vegetarian. Because I am a vegetarian I felt a little bit of a connection with this funny leopard and his lifestyle choice. I gathered the photos together and from looking at the pictures I put together a story which I decided to write as a poem. Using storybird you can publish your story to their website, and buy a pdf file of your story. Also if you were interested you can buy a physical copy of your book that they will print and mail to you.

I needed to add music to my story, and after listening to a bunch of different songs on youtube, I landed on the song “Your Hand in Mine” by Explosions in the sky, which I then download on ITunes. In order to put the story and audio together to I put them into IMovie, using this program I was able to put the two together. Also in IMovie I was able to create my own narration recording. After several attempts at recording myself reading my story with several fumbles in my words, I decided to get my husband to give it a go. His recording was very clear and free or my word fumbles in one take, so I decided to use his recording. It took me a while to put the three together, getting the slides and the narration to line up and getting the right balance in both audio recordings.

But the end I was proud of what I came up with. My digital short story is about a vegetarian leopard who searches for friendship and acceptance of his lifestyle choices.

Check out my digital story:

A Pep Talk

While I was watching this video I was thinking about social media and the fact that it is amazing that we can share these types of things with each other. I believe that this also demonstrates how as teachers we can help our students share their ideas and inspirations with the world. All it takes is some creativity to let kids get what they want to say out into the world, and people will watch it.

Classroom Website

The past two weeks we have been putting together classroom websites! This is something that I am excited about because I want to be able to use a website for my classroom.

I believe that this is a useful tool for teachers because it gives parents and students a place where they can come to find out about you as a teacher. Parents will have a better understanding about what is going on in your classroom. The website can also be used to post homework, classroom rules, and class schedule This website will hopefully make parents feel more involved in their child’s education. Having open communication with parents and students is important, communicating through technology, and having a classroom website is another way to build a classroom community.

Wallwisher

One of the sites that I am really enjoying is “wallwisher,” at the moment I am using it to keep all of my class notes. I am able to gather information and keep it all on this one website. As I learn about more websites that I can use in my classroom, I save their links to this wall rather than bookmarking or writing them down. I also find this useful for taking notes from my professional development workshops, perviously the notes i take from these workshops end up lost because I don’t really know what to do with them once it is over. I get a lot of useful information from these sessions, and this way I am able to have one place to keep this information, and I can save all of the useful links that are being shared in these workshops. Using this tool I can also share my wall with other people and get them to add to the information on my wall.

If you wish to take a look, you can follow this link to my ICT wall and check out the information I have gathered so far! Although you will not be able to add any information at this time.

http://wallwisher.com/wall/syy2937zpe

This tool can also be used in the classroom, you can create a subject and get your students to contribute their opinions, students will also be able to see the input of their classmates. Students can make their own walls, and use it to work on group projects.  

If you want to start your own wall, follow this website and you can get started.

www.wallwisher.com

This is a really interesting tool that can be used in many creative ways. If you have any ideas or other suggestions for using wallwisher please let me know!