Final Impressions: TPTE 486

As I look back over my semester in TPTE 486, I've come away with the following final impressions.

Overall, I enjoyed this course and its content, and I found most of it relatively easy to comprehend/master. Because this class is centered around technology, I really appreciated that the focus was on working with the applications and programs to create finished artifacts instead of just learning about them in an abstract, distant way. I also appreciated how helpful and patient our instructor (Ginny Britt) was when we had questions or problems. Looking back at my first blog post about course expectations, I do, however, find that my expectations for the course weren't met completely. One of my main wishes was that the course would provide guidance about when it is best to use technology versus when it is just a distraction. A day or two of discussion on this topic would have been really helpful.

Even such, I'm very glad that I learned a great deal about the many different programs and web 2.0 tools available and about potential ways to include them in my classroom instruction. I'm not completely sold that many of the tools can be used well in a high school English classroom, but I was particularly pleased with Storybird (for creative writing work), Wordle (to highlight themes in a piece of writing), and Glogster (for its capabilities to develop posters as creative projects or summaries of learning). I am much less likely to use programs like Pixlr, Smilebox, and Timetoast because I don't see their applicability to my specific classroom. I also wasn't impressed with Inspiration and ActivInspire because I felt that similar products could be created more easily in other programs, but I know that I will need to learn to utilize these programs (especially ActivInspire) in ways that benefit my classroom.

After completing this course, I feel relatively proficient regarding different computer and web 2.0 tools and applications and how I can use them in the classroom. I came into the class with a good comfort level regarding my ability to use technology and tech-based applications, and that comfort level has only improved. While I don't feel completely comfortable with everything and its use, I do feel more competent than I did before beginning the course. I would have liked more hands-on experience working with the interactive white board and its touch menu and with related components like clickers. I would have also liked a hands-on tutorial about how to connect laptops to projectors, how to input the audio cords, etc., as I see that often being a problem with teachers who don't have a permanent set-up in their classroom.

First Impressions: Website Development

I created an original website, Ms. Hoffman's Class Website, for completion of this project.

1) What went well or not well?
Pulling together content for the site was fairly easy, as most of it had been created throughout the semester for other assignments. Figuring out the layout was also pretty intuitive because we had been provided a clear outline of what the site should contain. Some problems that arose included being unable to upload content for the web 2.0 tools page due to problems with Google Sites and some formatting problems while trying to lay out some of the images. Overall, this project went fairly well, even if it took a while to complete, because it built on previous learning.

2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
As students, parents, and teachers become increasingly connected through technology and online means, it will be essential to develop and maintain a web presence. One of the easiest ways to do this will be through a class website, which can serve as a portal and landing spot for all things related to my classroom, whether it be updates to parents about upcoming reading topics, reminders to students about assignment due dates, or the posting of tips sheets and study guides.

One of the most important things that this assignment has taught me is that organization and pre-planning of the site's layout is of key importance. When students and parents come to my site, it is important that they be able to find what they're looking for and be able to find it quickly. Clean, clear organization and content not only makes it easier for the viewer to navigate the site, but it may also impact how those parents and students think about me as a teacher. It's important to put forth a professional and helpful persona in all forms, whether in person or online.

3) What will you do differently next time?
If I were to create another classroom website, I would allow myself more time to work on it and I would prepare my layout/storyboard further in advance. I would also try to bring in more original content to make the site more personalized and reflective of my personal teaching style and goals.

Artifact: Storybird

Storybird is a free, online tool that allows users to create storybooks using their own words and original artwork contributed by artists. I really like this program, and I could imagine using it as a prompt for creative writing exercises in my future classroom.

Starry, Starry Night on Storybird

First Impressions: iMovie & Digital Storytelling

A three-minute trailer intended to get students excited about reading Jane Austen's classic.

1) What went well or not well?
This was another very frustrating project for me. In all, I spent 8 hours working to create a three-minute book trailer. When I was finished, the product didn't seem much better or different than that which I could have created using programs like Smilebox or Animoto (i.e., a fancy slideshow). Because I had never made a digital movie before, I had no experience with this type of software. I found that iMovie was very touchy, in that it was sometimes difficult to highlight what I wanted or move the intended object without affecting other items. I also had problems (as did at least two of my classmates) with the program not saving text changes that I made. When I uploaded the file to YouTube, it would play a version that did not match what I saw on the screen. I also had trouble editing a music clip using the tools included in iMovie. Despite these complaints, I am grateful for the experience of working with this program because I now have a better sense than I did before of what's involved in producing a digital movie.

2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
Even with the problems I had with this project, I know that students and teachers alike can do great work with this program and others like it; I just need to learn the skills to be able to use it more effectively so I can use it as a teaching tool. In my future classroom, given student access to computers and appropriate software, I can see myself creating assignments that ask students to make live-action videos to share with the class, such as a dramatic reenactment of a scene from a play we're reading. I might use this as an assignment that everyone must partake in, or it could be an alternative option for creative students who like less traditional work. To avoid worries about copyright and fair use, I would expect students to create live-action videos with original content instead of slideshows with images taken from other sources.

3) What will you do differently next time?
If I work with iMovie again, I will come prepared with a music sample that has already been edited to the needed length and I will come prepared with a larger amount of patience. I would also want to work in another program, such as a PC-based application, to see how it compares to using iMovie. Since many schools will not have fully-equipped Mac labs available, I think it would be important to have familiarity with a variety of programs that do similar work. I would also want to work with video clips, instead of still images, to learn how to edit and manipulate them into a finished project.

Artifact: Animoto

Below is a short photo montage I created using Animoto. Animoto is an online service that allows users to create animated slideshows with music and backgrounds using their own photos and video clips. My slideshow includes photos of the amazing natural sights I saw in the Pacific Northwest during summer 2011.

First Impressions: ActivInspire & Interactive White Boards

Below is a screenshot of the ActivInspire flipchart I created as my artifact.

1) What went well or not well?
Of all of the projects we have yet worked on this semester, this was the most frustrating one by far. I found that ActivInspire was not an intuitive or user-friendly program. Simple tasks like creating a table became time-consuming ventures, and I found that the "payoff" of what I created didn't feel like it was worth the time it took to create it. This felt especially true because I knew that I could create similar, equally useful products using programs like PowerPoint in a fraction of the time and that those products could also be utilized via the interactive white board system. I think our class and project time may have been better used to learn about many of those functions that we'll use more often (e.g., pulling up a Word document and writing/highlighting over it or pulling up a PowerPoint or Prezi) than on creating flipcharts.

2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
Because interactive white boards are slowly but surely replacing regular boards, it is imperative that I become familiar with how to use this technology well. Interactive white boards provide a great number of new opportunities for student involvement and interaction, but their use may be more limited in my own classroom because I will be teaching at the high school level. I hope to use this technology to engage students in ways that might not otherwise be possible, such as through the use of mutii-user activities like answering questions via clickers or playing a Jeopardy-style game to review content.

3) What will you do differently next time?
I would come prepared with the exact content I wanted to input into the flipchart, and I would have allowed myself more time to simply play around with the different features and become more comfortable with them. This would make the process go more quickly, instead of learning the program's capabilities at the same time as I was creating and editing the content.

Artifact: Google Forms

Below is an artifact that I created using Google Forms. Google Forms allows users to create forms to collect and aggregate responses from a group, whether it be for RSVPs to an event, responses to a survey, or entries to an online contest. I used my Google Form to solicit responses about summer reading preferences among a high school class.

Artifact: Audioboo

listen to ‘Audioboo Test’ on Audioboo

First Impressions: Inspiration & Digital Diagrams

1) What went well or not well?
Coming up with content for my Inspiration diagram was easy, and I enjoyed parts of the layout process. I did, however, find some parts of the process more tedious than expected. I also found it frustrating that some parts of the design process were not intuitive; because of this, I spent more time than I wished having to ask questions or poking around on different menus to find what was needed. More explicit written directions would have been helpful for tasks like saving/exporting the file as a .jpg and how to upload it to our personal websites since it was the first time we had done that.

2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
While this tool can create fun and appealing diagrams, I don't expect that I would use it often to create diagrams that I would distribute to students. Instead, I would be more likely to use it as an assignment in which students would be asked to create their own diagrams or webs to organize content for a project or paper.

3) What will you do differently next time?
I would come prepared with the exact content I wanted to input into the diagram/web, and I would have my links ready before starting. This would make the process go more quickly, instead of creating and editing the content at the same time as I was designing it.

First Impressions: Scavenger Hunt & Web Albums

During the past week and a half, our class has experimented with digital scavenger hunts in order to create a Picasa Web album and a Google Presentation to showcase our resulting images.

1) What went well or not well?
The scavenger hunt portion of the assignment was very enjoyable and allowed us, as students, a break from sitting in the classroom. Uploading the images to our computers afterward was also easy, and Picasa Web and Google Presentations were generally easy and mostly intuitive to use, especially if you have had experience with other programs like MS PowerPoint.

One thing that didn't go well was the embedding process for both slideshows. For each application, the directions given in class weren't clear enough about how to find the embedding code, and it took a lot of poking around and some help from another student in order to do it successfully. I can see this being a pitfall for classroom use because the embedding code does not come up under the "share" button on Google Presentations, which is the place I thought to look.

2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
Among the different tasks/applications in this assignment, I am most likely to use Google Presentations with my future students. While I will have access to MS PowerPoint and will likely use it to create my own presentations for use in class, I cannot assume that all students will have access to the same or a similar program. Because Google Presentations is free and can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection, it can provide a great alternative to purchased programs like MS Office Suite that students may not have at home. It is also a program that everyone can pull up and work on together in a school computer lab.

While I can see some of the benefits of using digital scavenger hunts or Picasa Web albums for certain assignments, I don't expect to use them frequently (if at all) in my classroom. Though the scavenger hunt was fun and allowed a break from our regular classroom activities, I didn't find much learning value in it. The same held true for Picasa Web albums. While there may be opportunities for students to create and present slideshows of images, most assignments I can envision would be a combination of images and text, which would be better served through use of MS PowerPoint or Google Presentations.

3) What will you do differently next time?
If I were to complete this assignment again, I would want our group to take more time and care when taking photos during the digital scavenger hunt. Even though most of our images came out reasonably well, some were blurry, either due to hand movement during the shot or not focusing the image correctly before taking it. When we got back to the computer lab and uploaded the images, we were disappointed to find that some of them were not usable.  

Artifact: Smilebox

Personalize a free slideshow

Artifact: Scavenger Hunt

Picasa Web Album

Google Presentation

Artifact: Pixlr

Artifact: Time Toast

Artifact: Delicious

Three selected sites via Delicious social bookmarking site.


Angela Hoffman's Delicious Site.

Artifact: Glogster

I created the below artifact using Glogster. Glogster is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to create multimedia posters online using words, images, and video clips. I can imagine using Glogster in the classroom by having students design creative displays about books, characters, or ideas we are examining.

Artifact: Wordle

I created the Wordle below using the text of then-Senator Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech given on March 18, 2008, at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA. This speech is an excellent choice for teaching rhetorical analysis, and this Wordle helps highlight the main themes of the speech (i.e., race issues) in a striking visual format.

First Impressions: Smilebox

 

For my web 2.0 project, my partner and I have been assigned Smilebox. Smilebox is an online service that allows users to use their own photos to create digital scrapbooks, greetings, slideshows, collages, and photo albums. The basic service is free, but users can upgrade to a paid membership in order to receive access to a greater number of designs and music options. Teachers may also apply to upgrade free of charge when using the service for educational purposes.

The Teacher's Toolbox link on the site provides suggestions for how educators can use the service to benefit their teaching and classroom activities. Some possible applications include creating newsletters for students and parents, overviews of teaching units, and commemorative slideshows and cards after events.

Despite these suggested uses, I am not yet impressed with Smilebox as a potential classroom tool for myself. Other than providing attractive backgrounds for pictures or text, I don't believe that its tools would truly enhance anything that I would use for teaching purposes. It's mostly just a fancy version of PowerPoint that takes more time to use and adds distracting elements. It seems much more like a scrapbooking site than anything else.

While a teacher might enjoy making a virtual scrapbook of photos as a class trip or a science fair, I don't see this service as having true educational value for me as a high school English teacher. I think Smilebox might appeal much more to someone who teachers K - 2 grades or a creative arts subject.

First Impressions: Wikis

While wikis do provide the opportunity for joint creation with multiple collaborators, I found the site we utilized (PBworks) to be less user-friendly than other web 2.0 tools I've used. Other than collating links to our individual pages together in one space, I didn't see how the use of the wiki differed from having individual blogs for students. Also, while we will learn how to co-edit a page on a future project, I didn't really get to see how to use wikis effectively for multiple contributors, such as a class of 25 students. It seemed like it would be very time-consuming and tedious to keep track of different students' contributions, edits, and efforts. I would be more much willing to utilize this tool if it had a "track changes" format similar to that of Microsoft Word where you can see all of the changes made by different contributors. The prospect of having to click on multiple different archived versions of the same page and then look for changes between versions seemed daunting.

In my future classroom, I see wikis being best utilized as a review tool for exams or projects. For example, students could post questions on a wiki so I could see all of their questions on one page, as opposed to paging through different threads on a discussion board. Students could also use this space to respond to one another with answers. I also think that wikis could be used in my classroom for group projects, where students would be placed into small groups to create and post a project

If I do choose to utilize wikis in the future, I would look further into how to track different students' contributions and how to find a program that is more user-friendly than PBworks. I'm not sold yet on their utility over other web 2.0 tools, but I can see the potential. 

Reflection on Evaluating Websites Assignment

For today's in-class assignment, I completed a critical evaluation of a folklore and folk tale website, The Moonlit Road. Comprised of "Strange Tales of the American South," this site contained a varied collection of new and revisited Southern folk tales from various contributors. All of the tales were available in text form, and some were available as audio files directly on the page or via podcast. Four of the tales also had lesson plans available for teacher use.

This assignment taught me to look at all websites, especially those intended for teaching use, with an even more critical eye than I have previously. Choosing a website and using it as a classroom tool indicates to students that you, as the information authority within the classroom, consider it a reliable and worthy source. From this, students will learn what is considered a good source, whether the site in question actually is reliable and trustworthy or not. Teachers must be especially careful to be a good example of a critical evaluator for this reason.

For example, a casual look at The Moonlit Road site would give the impression that it could be a useful classroom tool when teaching about folklore and folk tales, especially given its inclusion of lesson plans with four of the tales. A closer look, however, reveals that this site is questionable as a teaching resource for a variety of reasons. The site's creators/administrators don't list any credentials for themselves as historians, folklorists, or even as hobbyist storytellers. Authors of individual stories also don't provide any information about themselves other than a first and last name; none include an email or contact address if you were someone wanting to seek more information about the story, its creation, or its history. Because of this, the site doesn't really help a teacher explain much to students about folk tales, how they're created and passed through generations, etc. By using this as a source, a teacher may unintentionally model for students that websites need not have clear credentials or specific sources for their information, which, of course, is a model that should be avoided. 

Learning Expectations for TPTE 486

(Children using the computer. Source: Wikimedia Commons; USAID Bangladesh.)

I expect that my semester in TPTE 486 will provide me with a solid background in how and when to best utilize technology to reach my teaching goals in the classroom. Though I'm already comfortable with many web 2.0 applications and gadgets, I've never thought about how I could use them to enhance learning among students. I hope to be exposed to easy, effective, and inexpensive strategies and tools that I can use in any classroom, even one that has limited computer capabilities. I'm also hoping that this class will provide clear guidance about when technology should be used versus when it's just a distraction.