screencast video

This was a fun thing to learn! It was great to be able to show students how to use the computer and accomplish a certain skill.

What I chose was showing students how to use the animation tool in their PowerPoint presentations.

I re-did the video 3 times. Jing is very user-friendly. You can re-do things after you review it to make sure you are creating the effect you want and making sure what you are showing is clear to the students.

I really wish I had a microphone on my computer. I wanted to be able to do a video on food webs and I was going to discuss them by using graphics and being able to point to different sections of the graphic.

This is a great tool for the classroom especially if you have students learning from home because they are ill or we have snow days.




Within the SAMR model, it appears that this ability to show a video online of what you are doing on your laptop is a transformation. I would consider it a modification. This is huge, but most students are used to using their own laptops. You are just able to show them your laptop and teach them how to  do certain tasks.

Here is my video on animations in PowerPoint presentations:

Jing Image

This was quite an amazing assignment! The tutorials were extremely helpful.

Her is my screencast image link:

Food Web


For the screencast image, I added the arrow. The texts are easy but you need enough room in the image for the text boxes. I could not figure out what the frame was and how it worked.

I am thinking that Jing is an enhancement technology that augments and improves function. Most images you download cannot be manipulated in any way. This lets you add to the image to a certain degree, but more importantly is how convenient it is to share the image.

I'm not sure if you can consider this a modification tool because the image is modified but the "task" itself is not really. The task in this case is copying an image and sharing it. We were able to do this with other programs. This just makes it easier and allows us to improve the task a bit.

Now I am going to try to embed the image and see if it works.

Numbers 1.2

This exercise was assigning letter grades to students' numerical scores.

The instructions and Excel help were very confusing.

Finally figured it out on my own by using the logical formula tab. It is neat to see it work after you enter the formula in just one cell.

However, I did notice that the grade given was not quite accurate because I did not round off on their numerical scores. One of the students had a score of 82.33. If I had rounded off, the numerical grade would have been 82 and the student would have received a C. Since I had not rounded off the grades, the formula gave the student a B in the class.

So I went back and rounded off their scores. I will try to upload the Spreadsheet on my blog. We'll see if I can do it!

If you click on the link for Numbers 1.1, you will go to my Google Drive. Click on the PhyllisMcBrideGrades2.xls to  see the assignment.

Google Docs

I was able to upload my resume on Google Docs. They made it very easy! It was also easy to link it to my blob, but I had to do it twice because I saved it before hitting the link button.

My resume link is Resume Phyllis McBride

Learning to link a document and share it with everyone is pretty amazing. The only way we used to be able to share documents with others was through email and Blackboard. At least on Blackboard, you could allow anyone at Shenandoah to view the documents. But the cloud opens this up to potentially everyone on the planet!

I think this skill relates to standard 3a of the ISTE Nets T. Teachers need to show their knowledge and skills as "innovative professionals" in a global and digital society and also to transfer our current knowledge to new technologies.

E-portfolios for professionals is the future and it's here!

Standard 5 appears to relate to everything we are doing in this course. I am improving myself as a professional, participating in lifelong learning, and plan to promote and demonstrate these new skills to my future students and to their school system administrators.

The cloud idea is amazing really because it can be accessed from anywhere. You cannot take your desktop to a different computer.

This technology also allows you to share, either to a limited number of people or it allows you to allow the public to view your information. I do like the idea that we can open a dialog with others around the world.

Diigo

I am going to try to use diigo this weekend to search for information for a middle school science unit I have to do on ecosystems.

I still do not quite understand what the "Diigolet" is...

My browser is Firefox. For searching stuff, I prefer to use google over all the other search engines.

I enjoyed reading the article on using this site for students in the classroom. This would be a great tool to teach students how to research and understand science writings. It would help students going into science, technology, and engineering.

It is important to remember that teachers need to teach students how to have substantial conversations with their peers and this is best done by showing them appropriate examples.

If I were to use Diigo in the classroom, I would need to come up with a Tagging Language. I haven't come up with a tag language for my bookmarks yet.

I also really liked the roles a teacher can assign to the students for bookmarking and for the annotations. My only question would be, do you allow the students to choose who gets those roles by their interests and abilities, or do you rotate them to make sure they all get a taste of what is required in all the roles. It might make sense to do this in middle school and then, by high school, allow the teams to choose their own roles.

Social bookmarking - what a great idea! To be able to share with others your interests and save time in the process! I also love that this is a global idea. Would we be able to have our students share a dialogue with students in another country? If so, that would be eye-opening for them.

I have to work with the site to see if it really is a good way to store and organize my bookmarks. Right now, I have no way of organizing my favorites, so I look forward to being able to do so!

Numbers 1.1

Wow! I really enjoyed this assignment! The visuals were the most helpful. The exercise made me go through more of the menu options so I learned where a lot of things were.

I used the help button also. Nice to know it is there and I need to get used to this tool and just use it!

I saved it in the shared folder I created on the google drive, but I am not sure if you can access it or not. It's titled PhyllisMcBrideGrades1.

I realized after taking the numbers the quiz that I do not know as much about Xcel as I thought!

I rarely used the number's functions and it showed!! I look forward to learning more.

Phyllis