Week #16

This week I figured out how to fix the music on iMovie. I am so relieved. It was so obnoxious to have to use GarageBand to cut music.

Our digital story is awesome. I love it. I believe that it is powerful and the message that we are trying to send comes across through the video. I am really excited to be a teacher someday and be able to show my students videos that are available on the internet. Sometimes, other people can say things better than you can. I know I have said this a million times before, but I think that it is really important to be able to mix things up in the classroom. You don't want it to be monotonous and boring. And guess what! Technology is the perfect way to mix things up.

This class has taught me how to build a classroom website, on UEN and GoogleSites. On these websites I can keep parents informed and remind students of what assignments are due and when tests are coming up. I have also learned how to use powerpoint in ways that I never knew about. I learned about internet safety and now know where to send my students to learn how to be responsible on the web. I also learned about reliable sources and what sites I should trust and should not trust.

I learned how to do a podcast as well as a vidcast, and I believe that I will be using both of those things in my future classroom. I will also be teaching my students how to do those things because they definitely break up the monotony of school.

The thing that I am most excited to use in the future are digital stories. I seriously think they are awesome. I am grateful that I learned how to use PhotoStory, even though I am partial to iMovie. Photostory is offered for free on PCs, which is what a lot of schools have. I do believe that iMovie is easier to use, but some schools do not have a lot of Macs and I do not have enough money to buy all of my students Mac laptops.

I am 100% ready to keep up on technology for basically the rest of my life...or for however long I am a teacher. I know that the technology that will come out in the next ten years will completely blow my mind, but will make life a lot easier and will make teaching students a lot more interesting and fun!

Week #15

I am seriously so excited about my digital story. It has been a lot of fun creating it. I loved putting it to music and finding the pictures to put in the digital story. My partner and I decided to use iMovie since I was more familiar with it and since it can potentially make a better movie than Photostory. The only problem with iMovie is I can't figure out how to cut music and make it fade in and out using iMovie so we have had to cut the music using Garageband (another Apple application)

I think that digital stories are so great because it breaks from the monotony in classrooms. It allows teachers to be creative and to really get their point across using pictures, music and audio. I can't wait to make more digital stories and I definitely think that I will be using them in my classroom. I really want my students to have the option of doing digital stories as well. And it is great that I have learned how to use Photostory, since that is free on PCs. In my opinion, I would much rather make a digital story than write a paper. I can see myself giving my students that option.

This weeks video was really cool. I feel like we have had one kind of like it before, but this one presented some new information. There are 31 Billion searches on google every month, in 2006 there were 2.7 billion. This shows how dependent our society is on the internet. If i want information, I am not going to go to the library and find a book, I am going to go to google and find information. If myspace were a country, it would be the 5th largest in the world. I can't imagine my life without technology! I can't even go one day without checking my email or sending a text message. The first commercial text message was sent in December 1992. Today the number of text messages sent and received everyday, exceeds the total population of the planet (and I definitely make a huge contribution to that number). I was fascinated to know that soon China will be the #1 english speaking country in the world. IT'S NOT EVEN THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE. It will be very interesting to see how the world is in a couple of years, because I have a feeling that it won't be anything like it is today.