Weekly Blog 10 - Final Post

Thursday marked our last class of the quarter. It was sad to see this quarter come to an end but I’m excited for the future. In class, we had two guest lecturers. One talked about a technology that she felt could be beneficial to teachers. It used a Nintendo Wii controller to work the mouse on a computer that was projected onto the white board. I found this to be a cool little piece of technology. The second lecturer was a astrobiologist who talked to us about his field. This was an interesting presentation to me, as I have always been a bit of an astronomy and astrobiology enthusiast. I learned a lot from both lectures. There are classroom applications to both of these lectures. The first one is obvious. The tool discussed it something that could easily be used in a classroom as a cool and innovative way to teach ones students. The second lecture was important because it emphasized the importance of a variety of fields. Astrobiology utilizes geology, astronomy, biology, and other fields. The lecture served as a reminder that in the real world, it often takes a variety of areas of expertise to solve problems. This is most likely my last post on this blog. It was fun blogging throughout the quarter and it really helped me digest some of the issues talked about in class. It’s been fun.

Weekly Blog 9

Today’s class was dedicated entirely to working on digital story projects. Still, even though there was no lesson, I was able to learn some valuable information. For my group’s digital story, we are focusing on a program called VoiceThread. I had no prior knowledge of how to use this program, so by playing around with it in class, I was able to gain a better understanding of how to use it. Voice thread allows one to create a digital story with still images, video, and sound. What is cool about this program is that users can leave comments on videos in a variety of ways, be it through text or narration. This site has some definite classroom applications. VoiceThread could be used as an alternative way to present projects. By using this format, a teacher and other classmates could comment digitally on the video. Or a teacher could have their students watch history-related digital stories, for example, then leave comments. By doing this, students would be engaging in an online discussion of sorts. I do have questions about this program still, notably, just technical things that I find confusing. I still don’t think I realized the full potential of this program, and would like to become more familiar with all the possibilities of using this site.