Thing 15

This assignment is a freebee for me.  I've been using Zamzar for years.  It has made me a hero to many staff and students.  As the media specialist this website has saved hours of work, tears from teachers and students and made my day.  Because it is web based I can get to it from any computer, I can have students upload their documents and have them emailed back to themselves or to me.  Considering all the possible versions of documents that students can have and that get emailed to us this is a great tool.

MediaConvert is a new one and easy to use and I'm sure it is going to save me time.  I work with students video projects frequently and with all the cameras that students use converting their files has been a chore.  I have my personal laptop set up to convert files but if I don't have my computer at school I can't help the students.  This web site will help at school and I can share it with students for their use too.  I didn notice that for text if converts to multiple file formats including: pdf, open office, pocketword, wordperfect, starwriter but it is missing Works, a format students often have at home.

Google Calendar is one of my favorites, I use it for work.  I have my library schedule posted on my website for students and staff to see: http://www.rockfordschools.org/staff/bluntk/library%20info.htm .  It helps me stay organized and lets students and staff know what is going on.  They can check the schedule from home or school.  I also use Google calendar as my personal calendar and my adult daughters do to, so we share calendars.  Using google I can have all of the calendars; my school calendar, my personal calendar and my kid's calendars visible on one color coded calendar.  If I used the Outlook calendar at school, I would not be able to blend all of my calendars as well and have them come up on my Mac, school computer and I-pod as easily. 

Capstone for Things 8-14

Reflection on things 8-14.

The resources presented for 8-14 have been very helpful and the additional links provided are helping me to build a library of resources for current and future projects.  The activities have been helpful but I have also spent as much time just checking out the wealth of resources provided.

The review and discussion sites on copyright are always useful, there are so many different interpretations and situations that arise in schools.  Many of the resources will be useful as questions come up at school.  Learning about CC and learning how to use it made me more aware of making myself become a participant in the process which will help me learn and understand the system more.  Since I find modeling to be one of the best ways to entice students and teachers to learn new skills, my learning to use one and using it makes it a lesson in waiting.  Many of these tools will help us meet the needs of our learners and cover the Marzano Strategies for Nonlinguestic representation, Cues, Questions and Advanced Organizers
and many of the NETS-T: 1.a, 1.b, 1.c, 2.a, 2.c, 2.d, 3.a, 3.c, 3.d.

Summary of  9, 10, 11, 13 & 14

Tools for photo editing, digital storytelling, interactive tools, video and audio resources and unique presentation tools like Prezi  support our diverse learners, giving us more ways to learn and teach. The wealth of online interactive tools and resources are useful for teachers and students and finding online tools for the students to use at school and at home will be useful for many of our projects.  Locating sources for copyright / royalty free resources is helpful, the more resources available the easier it is to get students and staff to use images without violating the creators’ rights.   Digital storytelling and different presentation tools will help us create engaging and meaningful lessons. Having a wealth of visual resources can make our lessons and student activities more interesting.

Thing 12 – Evaluation and Assessment: Learning to use data to evaluate our students and ourselves is a requirement in today’s classroom.  Using data to evaluate our teaching activities and lessons can help us improve our teaching and increase our students’ success rate. NETS-T: 2.a, 2.d, 3.a, 3.d

and Marzano Strategies: Reinforce Effort and Provide Recognition; Objectives and Feedback

I will be incorporating more use of copyright and creative commons in the lessons I do with student where we add visuals, these lessons include our mythblogs and our advertising websites.  I will also be encouraging the students to use picnik to edit photos to fit their needs instead of just copying and pasting.  I will also use these tools when working with our Stress Management class when they do their personal introductions using Windows Live Movie Maker to add audio to a collection of pictures and images of their class partner.  We will use movie maker instead of photo story or animoto because those programs are blocked for students.

Thing 14

While I had heard about the different online video sources such as Teacher Tube it has been awhile since I checked out these sites and I hadn't looked at ITunesU before.  I plan to look through these resources more and find topics to recommend to the teachers I work with.  I also plan to add these resources to a library web page.

We have access to Discovery Learning at Rockford.  Discovery Learning has several useful features for teachers and students.  Many of the videos can be used as short clips allowing for a quick visual presentation on a topic.  The service also has full length videos searchable by topic, grade level and standard.  The library, classroom features, and management tools are useful for the advanced users.

There are also audio clips that can be used to support topics and presentations.

The audio and video files help present information for the visual learners, the visual resources give us one more tool as teachers to present information to students allowing us more flexibility to support different learning styles.

Discovery Learning also allows students to view clips, so teachers can list clips as additional ways for students to get help and support on topics covered in the classrooms. 

Discovery Learning also has many audio and visual clips that are licensed for re-use in presentations and can be edited.  This added feature gives students and teachers the ability to manipulate the resource to fit their needs.

Thing 13

Quizlet is useful for the tools that are already there and for the cards you can create.  I like the fact that students can share and compete with each other and once you create the cards there are more activities that you can do with the same set.  This would be good for individual students but also for students to divide a class topic and create multiple sets for different lessons.  I plan to use this with my grandsons, to show to our language, health, and science teachers and to share with individual students.  I'm going to add a link on my library web page under useful resources.

Thing 12

I love Google survey tool.  It is useful for a quick review, surveys, and to collect input on a variety of topics.  I really like the survey summary report. 

Rubistar

Rubistar makes it easy to create a grade rubric. I  also like viewing other rubrics.  When I start a project I sometimes use other rubrics to help me focus on the topics I want to cover and the wording.  By viewing other rubrics it is like viewing your rough draft and making improvements before you even get started.

Rubrics not only help me focus on what I’m grading but help students to see what the main focus points of the assignment are.  Rubrics answer the students’ questions “what do I have to do, include etc.”  I good rubric will clearly show what is expected of the student. 

I will use this rubric to grade an introductory lesson on citations.  I want the students to be aware of the MLA citation format, formatting their document, and layout. 

Data tools allow short term tracking such as tracking your students during your class on class goals as well as long term tracking using standardized state test.  Teachers can track how students do on topics and adjust lesson plans and activities to improve student performance.  


I understand the basics of FERPA/HIPAA rules but I'm not sure how to reflect on the rules.  We do need to be careful what we share and make public and the rules are explained well enough that we can follow them if we just make sure we check what we are doing before posting/sharing/publishing information.  I would also think that the data systems we choose to use would have to be secure and enable us to follow the  rules.  If a data system doesn't have security in place to prohibit unauthorized access and different levels of access then a school system shouldn't be using it.

Thing - 11

I did not add a creative commons license because this is for face to face use only. 

I don’t want to make my prezi public because I feel very comfortable with my images in a one on one classroom setting, I’m not comfortable publishing the book images online.

http://prezi.com/invitation_to_collaborate/c9bde069493aa914ba9314652d789f5e5c34a3e4/

Prezi  is a nice alternative to PowerPoint, it is less linear than PowerPoint and allows creative layouts.  Prezi has fewer options than PP, lack of control of colors, limited backgrounds and I didn’t find a spell check, all drawbacks in some ways but bonuses in some ways.  The lack of options can be a benefit because students will need to focus on content and material.  The non-linear approach has some definite advantages for some projects, the paths allows for some different approaches to projects and allows for different learning methods and visual tools.  The program is dependent on an Internet connection, a drawback but it being online also means students have access to their file from home and school

The path tool will help show the relationships between topics and is great for having details off the main ideas.  Easy to create visual outlines of topics. This would be good tool for personal introduction projects, historical reports on explorers and even current events.  Even useful for reports from school committees, I could see each group being a branch, then adding their results. 

Zoomit

I can see using Zoomit for presentation when you want to focus on one section of your screen, I can also see it being helpful for visually impaired learners.  I'm running Windows 7 on my computer and Zoomit did not work so well, it was difficult to get it to toggle on and I wasn't always able to escape using the esc key. I really would find a tool like this useful so I may look for a newer version or a similar program.

Thing - 10

I spent some time trying to think of a story idea, I can think of lots of potential ideas for classroom use, book reports, historical summaries, personal interviews, and classroom introductions, but for myself I couldn't think of the perfect one for today.  Too many ideas and too much fun using the programs.  The organizers and the digital story are great tools to support a variety of learning styles and incorporate technology into the classroom.
 I finally settled on a sample book review, I'm not real happy with the outcome and as one of my reviewers noted my voice lacked enthusiasm.  Also noted by my reviewer and myself the review is too brief and I jump quickly to the conclusion. 

Here is the image of the story board, I liked using the organizer. 



I wanted to try Voice Thread but as far as I can tell, there isn't a free service.  I decided to download and use PhotoStory since I hadn't used it before.  The program is easy to use and has all the features and steps built in to make it user friendly.  The program itself is easy, finding the right images to use for the project took the longest time and is where I  ultimately cut back on my requirements due to a time constraint.   Depending on student projects I expect that finding the images and music would take more time than any other part of the process.  While Photo Story was easy to use Windows Live Movie Maker and I-Movie have more features and are fairly easy to use too.  I haven't tried PhotoPeach yet, but plan to just to compare the programs.
The Weebly website that I set up for the earlier activity does not allow posting of video on the free version so I'm including my video here.

Thing 9

I used FotoFlexer for editing because I had never used this one before.  Very cool and addicting.

I uploaded a photo from a trip and started using the tools.  Very user friendly, I didn't have to download anything and I didn't have to sign up for an account, all very important if I want to use this with students or teachers at school.  I can see lots of uses for this program at school, editing pictures for presentations, creating posters as projects on different topics, creating visual flash cards and images for studying.  I used a lot of the tools for editing and got a bit carried away, in the end I started over and used just a few tools for  my sample.  I was able to add text to the image, then I also used the poster tool which gave me more places to add text.  I added an animation in one corner and then added a screen shot of a google map of the location where the image was shot.  With the variety of tools I can see all sorts of uses, you can even save them as animated Gifs, great for presentations and web pages. 

Here is what I started with:

Here is my poster:

I decided to check out Picasa since I already use Flickr for my personal photos.  I think it great that it will use my existing blogger/gmail account and it already has my blog images in a separate album.  I like the controls on who can see the images and the ability to just share using a link: http://picasaweb.google.com/bluntkimberly/Trip?authkey=Gv1sRgCOXu3N-pq6WhzAE&feat=directlink

So then I had to try the slideshow feature:


I may have used this before but don't remember liking the features this well.  I can see students and teachers using this as an easy presentation tool for images.

Thing 8

Most my students don't know what copyright is, those that do are confused by it.  Asked about what is copyrighted on the Internet, very few students knew that everything is considered copyrighted. Since most teachers don't require students to site or credit the images the students use in projects, students assume that all images are free to use. When asked who should be credited for the images found through a Google image search, most said Google.   Most students felt that if they could download music from the Internet, they could use it and didn't need to have legally acquired it.  After reading and listening to many of the resources on copyright, I have to say I'm just as confused as before and most of my students are too.  I tend to error on the side of caution, the students tend to lean towards everything is "fair game."  I intend to continue to read about the topic, encourage teachers and students to be respectful of others' creative property, continue to promote use of creative commons sources, and give credit to sources that we do use.

Thing 7 - capstone

I'm inserting a link my capstone paper for Things 1-7. 

Thing 7

I already have a web presence and have for over 10 years.  I couldn't function without my pages.  My lessons are usually organized on a web page. In a sense my library is open 24 hours a day with my webpage.  When I work with teachers on projects I add their handouts along with mine on the web pages. If there is a grad rubric for a project I post that to the web page.  It allows my students access all the time, no more lost papers, no more I can't remember what you said or I couldn't find the directions.   I have links to the library catalog, library procedures, and library resources on my pages.

  I have been using Dreamweaver as my web page program and I still like the program but I'm considering moving my page because I can no longer access the web page server to update my webpage from home.  The other draw back with the current set up at school is that the web page doesn't update immediately when I make changes (it used to.)  In the past I was able to make updates, fix links and add links as students found resources, these are important for my lessons so I'm looking for a new "space."  After looking at the lessons and checking out the resources I thought it would be nice to try Weebly.  At first I had a riot with it, I edited a template to my colors and uploaded a picture of my library for my own template..great I thought.

Next I started to add pages.  The layouts are easy to use but lack the control I want.  Adding links, which is something I do a lot of in the library, is tedious.  Adding the links appears easy but the links don't always take to the text that you want to link to and there are too many steps to get it to link to a web page.  I ran out of patience.  On top of those issues are the pop ups that offer to sell you a domain name or buy premium features.

http://rfclibrary.weebly.com/