Aha Ideas!

Would love to create/facilitate teacher technology training camp like INTERACT that Lamar Consolidated ISD did! (TCEA 2010)

EDLD 5364 Teaching With Technology - Week 3 Blog Post on UDL Lesson Creation

This week we created a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) lesson from the CAST website incorporating the three brain networks: Affective, Strategic and Recognition. This was my first experience with this lesson builder. It was a thorough template designed to include all components of a well-thought out lesson plan that can incorporate technology while including modifications for all learners. My lesson in this template was on using the software Inspiration to generate a KWHL concept map. I've allowed for 3 class periods to complete the lesson but am wondering if it will take longer than I anticipated. This was a challenging but informative activity this week and I will seek to share this with the teachers on my campus.

Week 5 Assignment 1 Blog on Post Production of PSA

Our team's preproduction work included utilizing Google docs to add ideas about what we could do our PSA on. We uploaded the template in Google docs for the assignment for Week 3 that held all of our PSA work including the shots, the dialog scripting and copyright information so that we could all edit the document simultaneously. We had to experiment with the best way to get the footage to each other. Since our clips were relatively small, we were able to email them to each other one at a time. We used YouTube for our web delivery. We video chatted regularly and it worked out beautifully. Our collaboration can be viewed at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgr79mp9_3gt7r6nd2. Our copyright license allows for anyone to use or add to our work as long as attribution is given and the same license for the new work is given. No compensation can be received for using our work.

Week 1 Assignment 1 Blog on Video Conferencing

I attended 2 web conferences during this class.
On the first conference, there was some technical difficulty in getting audio and video to the participants and we spent a lot of our time getting the logistics worked out. Since then, I have really enjoyed the web conferencing experience. Getting to see and hear my classmates and professor really builds a sense of community. My teammates and I took this concept further by collaborating on our PSA through www.tokbox.com and video chatting through Google Chat. This method was extremely productive and our PSA work came out beautifully. The web conference experience is very valuable in an online learning experience and Lamar University should keep this in their classes.

Game ON! Reading Contest Commercial

Here's my Week 2 video assignment for EDLD 5363. This was a promo and follow-up to a contest I held this Spring for my middle school readers. I used Windows Movie Maker editing software and an audio clip from www.soundzabound.com. I had purchased a subscription for my library this year so that staff and students could have access to audio tracks to use in their own multimedia creations. I also used a video clip from the Internet that I downloaded from the Creative Commons site. The license for this video clip was a "share" license meaning that I have the right to use the clip, remix, etc. as long as I gave attribution to the author which I did in my credits. This was fun!

Digital Storytelling

I am currently taking a master's class at Lamar University online and our first project is to create a personal digital story. This was a fun project and allowed me to be creative and reflective. I've had some challenges getting the video I've created to upload to TeacherTube. I have uploaded to TeacherTube in the past so I'm familiar with how to do it, but my current video is not showing up when I search in TeacherTube. I've tried to upload twice. I will keep trying.

Check Out Edutopia Online for Keeping Current with 21st Century Teaching and Learning!

The George Lucas Foundation supports Edutopia which is a website that is dedicated to promoting what is working in public education. It can be found at http://www.edutopia.org. It is a searchable site that has embedded videos on current topics, articles, teaching resources, blogs to follow, etc. all aimed at informing the learning community and all education stakeholders on cutting edge teaching practices geared to improve learning.

The site is arranged in an online newspaper format where leading articles are placed in the middle of the page with links on either side and there is a navigational bar at the very bottom also for easy access. The page is all-encompassed on one screen. The color and format of the page is easy on the eye and the page is easy to navigate. The site also has a section that shows what the most popular articles are on the site with direct links to these. Viewers of the site can post comments on each article with a date and time posted.

The only negative I see at the moment is that it allows advertisements on the site.

This site is valuable to 21st century teaching and learning because it is a forum for all educational stakeholders to share information and ideas and to communicate about what is working in classrooms around the country. The fact that it is supported by a non-profit organization and not a commercial entity lends itself to really focusing on what's best for learning with hopefully no other agendas.