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.