Digital Stories

Create my own digital story? Yikes, more to learn!

Creating my own digital story was actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I expected to have a lot of trouble due to my lack of knowledge on the subject, but it was actually much easier than I expected. I was thinking that I would have liked to have had enough time to create a digital story I could use with students, but then I realized that is our next project for class.

I chose to create my digital story based on how I ended up as the owner of seven cats. I started out by taking pictures of each cat, then I dug out a few old pictures I had of two of my cats. Unfortunately, I couldn't find more older pictures of my cats. I would have liked to have used an old and a new picture of each one.

Next, I imported my photos to MovieMaker 3. I was shocked by how easy it was. I then added titles to each slide and recorded the words I had decided to speak for each slide. Lastly, I laid sound over the entire "movie." I chose to use Ozzy Osbourne's "Diary of a Mad Man" because I thought it was an appropriate choice for a digital story about how I ended up owning seven cats.

I'm still trying to come up with a subject for my next "story." I'm hoping to create a story that I can use in the future with my students.

Excel Frustrations!

Columns, rows? What's the difference?!

AlexKay_A4podcast.mp3 (1.18 MB)
frustration.jpg (3 KB)

Creating a crossword puzzle in Excel proved to be quite rewarding - and quite frustrating - for me. Rewarding because it is yet another tool that I will be able to use in the future to enrich the educational experiences of my students. Frustrating because I am just not all that Excel-proficient.

Teaching software within the context of another educational area is a great idea because it creates an environment where the learner is having a two-fold educational experience: he/she is both learning the software and a textually appropriate use for it at the same time. Teaching someone how to use something like Excel isn't nearly as good as teaching that same person to use Excel while at the same time giving her/him an idea of how it can be applied to a specific curriculum.

Today's students are so technologically advanced that I think a crossword creation project in Excel would work even better for them than it did for me. Because I already know the words - and I'm not that familiar with Excel - my frustration came from putting the crossword together. Someone more technologically savvy would be able to concentrate more on the words than on the software, thus spending more time learning the words.

Next time, I would employ graph paper much earlier in the process. I sketched out my puzzle first on regular paper only to find it didn't fit when I transferred it to graph paper. Needless to say, I was quite frustrated.

Lastly, creating the puzzle with an online puzzlemaker was actually incredibly easy -- much easier than creating it with Excel. While the online puzzlemaker took just a few minutes, Excel took more than a few hours.

AuthorPoint Lite

No more pesky downloads!

AuthorPoint Lite is something I can see myself using frequently. Although I have the technology to open PPT presentations without a problem, many people have not purchased the program, and as a result, they either cannot open the presentations or have a hard time figuring out how to view them.

With AuthorPoint Lite, other people can easily view the presentations I create -- without any hassle to either them or me, and more importantly, without wasting any time. No more fumbling around trying to figure out what file reader is required! Additionally, since the program supports animations, narrations, etc..., there will not be any need to "dumb down" presentations, either.

Discovering presentations also sounds interesting. It seems as if the site has a search option in order to allow users to find presentations on interesting topics. All in all, AuthorPoint Lite seems like a valuable tool to know about!

Sea Change - "Shift Happens"

A time of transformation

I see "Shift Happens" as a sort of documentary of what's going on in the world today. The main idea of the entire video seems to be the transformation of the world -- technological and otherwise. Another key point, however, is the idea that no great power can last forever. Over and over, the piece seems to indicate that the United States is being outstripped/outpaced by other nations - namely China and India. England's super power status in the year 1900 is used to prove this idea. The fact that Sprint gave more money to technology research in a year than the United States government only shows us how this outpacing is occurring.

That we're preparing kids for jobs that don't yet exist and problems that aren't yet problems makes it all the more scary to think about. How can we hope to compete on a global basis (something that our constructivist readings say we're no longer doing) if other countries are doing so much better than we are at teaching/incorporating/using technology?

The picture I've included says that technology changes, but people don't. I'm not entirely sure that's true. If people don't change, then how is the United States no longer keeping pace? Something must have occurred at some point.

A sea change is happening in the world, and the U.S. is running behind the curve. If we're not careful, our country will transform for the worse.

Converting Files to PDF - A1

1 October 2008

I've found learning how to convert files to pdf to be incredibly helpful to both my school work and my job. I had no idea it was so easy! Additionally, taking the inventory in the files we converted was also pretty interesting. I found out that I know at least a little more about technology than I thought I did. For example, I already have a program downloaded that allows me to take screen shots, and I've been using it for quite awhile now (FastStone Capture).

I did learn some new things, though: where to look for Web site coding. All in all, assignment A1 was both helpful and eye-opening!