Photostory and MovieMaker-You too can make cool stuff!

So last night's class was very satisfying. Both Andrea and Wendy did a nice job demystifying Photostory and MovieMaker, and I left class feeling empowered to use these new toys (to me) for all sorts of fun stuff. I've seen my husband and kids use the Mac versions of these programs; the results are always so polished that I had assumed a lot of expertise went into their projects. Though I'm sure one can get fairly professional looking results with a little more experience and time, it's nice to know that the programs are user-friendly even on a rudimentary basis. That to me is good technology--programs that don't require countless hours of fruitless frustration before becoming useful to me. Class overall was a pleasure last night--good amount of empowering info!

Cute little podcast

My daughter's first grade class posted a podcast to their class website commemorating Obama's inauguration. If the little kids can do it, so can we!!! Check it out:
http://www.onteora.k12.ny.us/4370_7012111485/blank/browse.asp?A=383&BMDRN=2000&BCOB=0&C=51926

The Wonderful, Wacky World of Wikis

I enjoyed tonight's class, mainly because I'm so enamored with wikis right now. I'm working to get one up for my mentor teacher, though we've already run into a technical roadblock. I think the possibilities are endless--I particularly like the idea of posting a wiki for each new unit, so it becomes a collaborative clearinghouse for students to return to for discussions, links to other resources, study/test prep;etc...I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but if a district doesn't have a Blackboard type of set-up, it seems like a cheap, relatively easy way to get at the same basic set up. Some people seem concerned with confidentiality, but for that, there's always email or google docs, and besides, I look at it like hanging students' work up in the classroom--it's a way for them to show off what they can do, and if they're self-conscious, they can either edit it or request that the teacher take it down. This is something I will most definitely be using, probably more than anything else we've worked on so far (except for Thinkfinity).

3 Ring Circus

So, we had 3 tasks to complete last night: acquainting ourselves with wikis, demonstrating our smartboard lessons, and completing a few tasks in Google Sketchup. Though each activity was valuable, once again I felt a little rushed and schizophrenic jumping from activity to activity in such short spurts. I barely had time to familiarize myself with what a wiki actually is, before I had to hunt one down and formulate a coherent opinion about it on Prof. M-G's wiki. Then on to Google sketchup, which is wildly intimidating on first glance, but is actually quite fun and fairly easy to use if you're not too specific about what your outcome needs to be. And the smartboard lessons, neither Matthew nor I had time to completely present our lessons to each other, let alone "play" with all the features of Smartboard.
I fully appreciate Prof's efforts to expose us to as much as possible in this one teeny weeny semester we have to get it all in. But as with the skype/ ichat class, I kind of felt a little frantic, and I don't absorb information all that well with a gun to my head and the clock loudly ticking in my ear. I need time to bump into walls a little bit, see what the possibilities are, before I'm expected to perform my own circus tricks. I guess this is a plea to slow it all down a little bit, because I fear it's all going to merge into an unintelligible, irretrievable mess in my easily overloaded head.
I have to say, the wiki thing is very exciting to me. I can see TONS of applications for this technology in an ELA classroom, and I fully intend to jump on it asap. As far as Google Sketchup, beyond our 21st century classroom assignment, I am having a very hard time thinking of ways to utilize this in an ELA class, but it sure is fun. I predict countless hours wasted away in front of this freebie. And Smartboard, well, I feel that to fully benefit from all it has to offer, i'm thinking a seminar is in order. There's just too much to absorb in two truncated class periods.