WEEK 4

This week’s assignments have been very informative which seems to be trend with this class. I continue to find new resources which I was not aware of that I will be able to use in my classroom. Of course, I will have to wait until I actually have a classroom before I will be able to use them. The technology explorations this week were very interesting. I really enjoyed tinkering with the tools on the ispeech.com website. I had some fun with the text to speech trial by typing in some of the silly, sometimes gibberish, statements that my three year old makes. I thought it was particularly funny to hear the serious, computer generated, voice say “poop nugget”. I guess when you share a home with two little boys your sense of humor reverts to childlike state. I also found the voicethread.com and scribblar.com sites to be useful. I am not sure that I will be able to use these in the elementary special education classroom where I plan on teaching someday but I can see how they would be beneficial for collaboration and online lessons. One of the resources from the tech explorations that I do plan on using is comiclife.com. I can imagine that an assignment where students are aloud to use their own photos to create a comic in which they are the main character will be fun and entertaining. I enjoyed exploring WWW.TED.com and found several interesting videos while I was there. I have previously visited this site at the coaxing of a friend who had suggested that I check out the Sir Ken Robinson video. This website offers so many interesting and informative talks that would be great to use in a variety of classroom settings. I plan on keeping this site in mind and visiting it frequently for my own entertainment and for using to motivate and inform students. There was so much information in this week’s assignments that will benefit me when I begin teaching.

I am not teaching so in order to complete the PowerPoint assignment I took advantage of the nearest captive audience that I could find that met the criteria of “any school-aged child”. Of course, this was my seven year old son who is in the 1^st grade. The content of my presentation was based on a series of assignments that he has been working on over the past week which involved learning the months. I created a simple 12 slide PowerPoint presentation with each slide representing a different month. Each slide contained a calendar of the month with some added photos and clip-art of related subjects. I also added a text box on each slide with “quick facts” for each month. I was proud of the fact that I was able to incorporate some audio clips to the presentation. I wanted to do more with the presentation but time would not permit. I was able to figure out how to add a brief audio clip of frosty the snowman to the December slide which my son enjoyed. If I were going to redo this presentation and had more time I would try to add some animation and attempt to create an interactive calendar on each slide. It would be cool to have a calendar that my son could actually navigate through and click on icons that would key informative animation or audio.