What I took away from this week was how important a PLN is to being a good teacher, as someone who is constantly building his or herself. A PLN allows you to ask questions and build on your resources through web resources, such as social media sites like Twitter. You can follow other teachers or educational resources and join conversations with teachers around the country or even around the world.
For Manitoba educators there is also a very cool site called MAPLE: Manitoba Professional Learning Environment, this site allows you to share resources and join conversations with other teachers around the province. This website to me is great because the information that it has will be formed around the Manitoba curriculum and you can find information specific to grades and courses. One of the other great perks of this site is that there is information and dates to professional development events that may be happening based on specific groups or areas of interest to you. MAPLE also provides Manitoba teachers with video resources, you can view presentations from educators or professional development sessions online.
John Evans who was presenting MAPLE to us made an excellent point that I plan on remembering throughout my teaching career. He said that we as teachers have a mind set to keep on learning but that we end up getting into a groove and teaching the same material the same ways over and over. That is what your PLN is all about, building your resources and your professional development to continue to better yourself as a teacher.
On a side note, always remember to "Publish" your blog. Double check, double check! ~ Sorry for the late post!
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Let's Make a Movie!!!
This week we got to do something extra fun and hilarious in ICT- we got to make movies! Now i'm not going to give it away as to what ours is, but it was a hoot to film and put together! On Monday we looked at videos and discussed what we can do with them, got into our groups and started talking about what we were going to do for short films. Tuesday we got our story board together and had everything planned out from roles, to props, and costumes. Wednesday we were busy all class filming but managed to get it all together and all of our scenes shot, there were MANY laughs to be had! Today (Thursday) we managed to throw all of our scenes together, overlay our music file, and do some editing to get a final product all in three days.
A little snapshot from our movie:
In order to get our project together we decided to film all of our scenes on an iPad and transfer the files over to a PC and use Windows Movie Maker. There would have been an easier way to go about this than we did. What we did was e-mail the individual files from the iPad to the PC, this was a time consuming and tedious process because we could only e-mail one file at a time and we had about twenty two. A faster process we noticed afterward would have been to plug the iPad in via USB and transfer the files that way. Lesson learned. When we had all the files transferred to the PC we put them into Windows Movie Maker and began editing our clips, moving them around, and getting our timing right. A problem that we ran into with the computers at the University was not being able to transfer our music audio file to overlay our video. This was a problem that was very time consuming and put a halt to our editing process, the security constrictions on the schools computers were what was making it difficult to get the audio file. We ended up saving what we had done and e-mailing the file, opening it up on a laptop and finishing the editing that way. This made it easier to add the audio because it was already purchased and on the laptop!
These are great skills for our students to have because it can really bring life to any projects that they may want to do a video for. Students could record themselves and make a video instead of doing a power point presentation, this may be easier for some students because they may be able to express their creative side and may be more comfortable presenting a movie rather than getting up and doing a power point presentation in front of the class. It is also more interactive and provides an opportunity to present more information that may not be able to be expressed in the form of a picture, or brought into the classroom. I will definitely be using this in my classroom with my students in multiple classes such as ELA- presenting a story line of a book that they have read, Science- using stop motion to make their own representations of properties of matter, or mitosis/meiosis. The possibilities are really endless in the movie making in the classroom!
This is a really fun exercise that I can't wait to use in the classroom with my students. Fun, educational, and engaging, what more can a teacher ask for?
A little snapshot from our movie:
In order to get our project together we decided to film all of our scenes on an iPad and transfer the files over to a PC and use Windows Movie Maker. There would have been an easier way to go about this than we did. What we did was e-mail the individual files from the iPad to the PC, this was a time consuming and tedious process because we could only e-mail one file at a time and we had about twenty two. A faster process we noticed afterward would have been to plug the iPad in via USB and transfer the files that way. Lesson learned. When we had all the files transferred to the PC we put them into Windows Movie Maker and began editing our clips, moving them around, and getting our timing right. A problem that we ran into with the computers at the University was not being able to transfer our music audio file to overlay our video. This was a problem that was very time consuming and put a halt to our editing process, the security constrictions on the schools computers were what was making it difficult to get the audio file. We ended up saving what we had done and e-mailing the file, opening it up on a laptop and finishing the editing that way. This made it easier to add the audio because it was already purchased and on the laptop!
These are great skills for our students to have because it can really bring life to any projects that they may want to do a video for. Students could record themselves and make a video instead of doing a power point presentation, this may be easier for some students because they may be able to express their creative side and may be more comfortable presenting a movie rather than getting up and doing a power point presentation in front of the class. It is also more interactive and provides an opportunity to present more information that may not be able to be expressed in the form of a picture, or brought into the classroom. I will definitely be using this in my classroom with my students in multiple classes such as ELA- presenting a story line of a book that they have read, Science- using stop motion to make their own representations of properties of matter, or mitosis/meiosis. The possibilities are really endless in the movie making in the classroom!
This is a really fun exercise that I can't wait to use in the classroom with my students. Fun, educational, and engaging, what more can a teacher ask for?
Friday, February 7, 2014
Look what I can do!!
At the end of this week we were introduced to what, in my opinion, is one of the coolest programs yet, Audacity. This is a program that you can use to take music and voice recordings and overlay them to create cool digital files that you can use in many ways in the classroom
In order to use this program what we did in class was record our voices, transfer the recording over to Evernote from an iPhone, and put it into the Audacity program. Once in this program you can edit how loud the sound is, and even put music into the background of your recording. This really creates a 'mood' and something that is another creative output for students. This program is good for you as a teacher if you create an exit slip where you record messages from students, compile them, and listen to them the next day as an activating strategy. Here is a little something I threw together quick using the program, and threw it on a slide in Windows Movie Maker:
On a side note the music in the background of the clip is a song called 'Love You Don't Go' by JEKK from a FREE website called Jamendo, all of the music on this site is free to download and use in videos! This is also another great way to use Evernote, if you are not familiar with the program I have blogged about it a few weeks ago!
Now Audacity isn't the only cool program that we used this week, we also explored quite a few programs that involve photo editing. Here I have a before and after shot of a picture of my niece that I edited using the programs Citrify and Tuxpi.
How cute is she? These are two programs that are really cool and both offer a variety of different features that students can easily use, these programs are super user friendly. These photo editing programs are another way to offer students a creative outlet using technology that allows them to express themselves in their projects and presentations and truly make them unique to themselves.
I hope you get some use out of these websites, I know I sure will; I am already thinking of ways to incorporate them into my next 5/6 pre-service teaching placement.
In order to use this program what we did in class was record our voices, transfer the recording over to Evernote from an iPhone, and put it into the Audacity program. Once in this program you can edit how loud the sound is, and even put music into the background of your recording. This really creates a 'mood' and something that is another creative output for students. This program is good for you as a teacher if you create an exit slip where you record messages from students, compile them, and listen to them the next day as an activating strategy. Here is a little something I threw together quick using the program, and threw it on a slide in Windows Movie Maker:
On a side note the music in the background of the clip is a song called 'Love You Don't Go' by JEKK from a FREE website called Jamendo, all of the music on this site is free to download and use in videos! This is also another great way to use Evernote, if you are not familiar with the program I have blogged about it a few weeks ago!
Now Audacity isn't the only cool program that we used this week, we also explored quite a few programs that involve photo editing. Here I have a before and after shot of a picture of my niece that I edited using the programs Citrify and Tuxpi.
Before:
After:
How cute is she? These are two programs that are really cool and both offer a variety of different features that students can easily use, these programs are super user friendly. These photo editing programs are another way to offer students a creative outlet using technology that allows them to express themselves in their projects and presentations and truly make them unique to themselves.
I hope you get some use out of these websites, I know I sure will; I am already thinking of ways to incorporate them into my next 5/6 pre-service teaching placement.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)