Week Thirteen

IN CLASS
We looked at several teacher sites this evening:

• http://www.teacherscholastic.com/

This website provided different technology tools for teachers. Examples of resources include: lesson plan templates, classroom management tools, and technology-based activities. I would most definitely use this in my future classroom. I am all about not re-inventing the wheel, so having all of these resources available to me would be time-saving and helpful.

• www.eduref.org/virtual/lessons/index.shtml

This website provided ready made lesson plans for teachers to take advantage of. Subjects that were represented included: math, science, social studies, health, and arts. These subjects were then sub-divided into smaller, specific sections. For instance, social studies was divided into such topics as anthropology, sociology, history, etc. These lesson plans were created for all different grade levels. I would most definitely use this site again; it contained a lot of lesson plans for the secondary grade level!

• www.teachers.net/lessons

This website boasted that it contains over 4000 free lesson plans for teachers to utilize. Like the website above it provided a lot of lesson plans in all different areas of study and grade levels. I would most definitely use this site, as well!

POST CLASS
After class, we were to watch a video about how to upload a PowerPoint presentation to YouTube. The video was created by an individual named Todd Kisicki who took this course last year. It is located at this URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAISFXYFi38&NR=1

Week Twelve

IN CLASS
We visited a number of teacher sites this evening during class. They were as follows:

• http://www.studentcam.org/

This website is run by C-SPAN, which is the organization that broadcasts to the public everything that goes on in Congress. Basically, StudentCam is a program in which students record their own video documentaries on various issues that are of concern to American youth (e.g.: childhood obesity) then submit their work to be judged and win prizes if warranted. This is a great opportunity for kids to take part in; I could see myself having a major project in my future classroom where all my students break into groups and work on videos for this contest to be submitted.

• http://www.pbskids.org/

This website is provided by the Public Broadcast Station (PBS) for a young audience. There are a great deal of games and videos that students could look at that originate from PBS Kids shows like Clifford and Curious George. I found this website useless for my own professional use, since I will be teaching at the secondary level.

• www.kn-pacbell.com/wired/bluewebn

This website was not opening up in my browser.

• http://www.merlot.com/

This website was created by the Merlot Research Group that focuses on server testing. I am not exactly sure why this website was included in our teacher sites; I will not be able to use it.

• http://go.editlib.org/a/2010

This is the website for the Education and Information Technology Digital Library. The specific article that was attached to this link does not exist any longer. I browsed the website and found that it would be very useful to utilize in my studies here at ASU, since it provides access to academic journals, eBooks, professionally developed PowerPoint presentations, and many more resources for teachers and those working to become teachers.

POST CLASS

We did not have any readings this week posted on BlackBoard. We were to focus our energies on our digital storytelling projects.

Week Eleven

IN CLASS
This week in class there were two teacher sites in my field of social studies:

• www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html

This website chronicles the top 100 American speeches, providing both text and audio versions of the speech. I will most definitely use this in my future classroom. I think providing the students with the actual words that were said at the time through the use of primary source documents, contemporary literature and video/audio clips is absolutely critical in giving them the opportunity to fully understand the historical period that is being studied.

• http://www.twhistory.com/

This website is actually a blog that is set up to document historical reenactments via the use of the technology Twitter. In this respect, different individuals take on specific roles and reenact certain historical events such as the Battle of Gettysburg through "tweets". I could possibly use this in my future classroom, although I would probably think having the students do reenactment skits might be a better alternative.

POST CLASS
This week's readings revolved around how to produce videos. They were as follows:

• How to Produce Video Interviews

This website documents how to effectively prepare for and carry out a video interview. It contains links to tutorials on how to create different kinds of interviews (i.e.: studio, mobile, and remote) while also providing resources on how to organize yourself before going out to do an interview (i.e.: framing, interview structure, and composition).

• Thirteen Steps to Better Instructional Visuals for Electronic Presentation- Dave Pavlik, Allan Schmidt

This article documented thirteen pieces of advice for educators when preparing electronic presentations, such as digital stories. The two points that I found most useful were 1) don't squeeze too much information on the page, and 2) organize basic presentation outline.