End of Semseter Blog

It seemed like the semester just flew by this year. I did finish everything before the end which was great. I was so busy teaching and coaching it was a real time juggle for me. I did learn a lot about different technologies and how they can be used in the classroom. Digital stories are a good tool if you have time in your schedule to put them together. I feel if I were to make digital stories for my classes it would have to be done over the summer. I am glad that they introduced engrade to everyone Before i used engrade it would take me hours to do students final grade reports with averaging grades and dropping grades. I tell the other teachers that I work with about engrade and how easy and effective it is for the classroom. The group work went much more smoothly then I thought it would have. The only think that was a drawback was that sometimes there was a delay between when I would talk and when everyone would hear me. Overall though this semester was a success not only in getting work done but also in seeing how there is a lot of online help for teachers. This summer when I am reviewing my curriculum I will be trying to add in more technology for the students.

Digital Story

This project was a little frustrating to me. I had a topic about the life of a baseball player. I had all the pictures I wanted and a few clips. When I tried to create the video, I could not get my videos to download into my movie. Worst of all I tried to record my voice and could not. There is a narrative feature on the program but it would not work at all. So I tried a few other voice programs online but those still did not work correctly. So I ended up just adding music and some title slides to help explain my video. I wish that the process when more smoothly but it was tough to get it to work and I wanted to try to hand something in at least. I guess this is what happens sometimes with technology. In the video I was looking to show how baseball is Americas past time, that players have a wide variety of equipment to pick from, then how a career in baseball starts in little league. Next the skills learned young can be turned into outstanding plays when the little leaguers grow up and become big leaders. I wanted to show that there is pain involved with greatness and showed some people getting injured while playing. But then at the end having them over come their injury to win a championship and hold that trophy high over their head.

WoW Project: Finally Finished

I have finally finished my WoW project. My WoW project was on using interactive technology in the3 science classroom. I thought this was a great topic for me since I am currently a middle school science teacher. Technology provides many different learning experiences for students. Most times schools are not going to have the equipment that is necessary to do experiments because of the cost. So by using online tools, students can still do the same experiments just virtually. This helps to reduce costs to the school without sacrificing learning for students. Some of the online tools that I found were virtual operations. I thought these were great. Students can perform hip replacement surgery, a heart transplant, or even brain surgery. Without these programs students would never have the opportunity to do these types of experiments. By doing these it may inspire some students to become doctors or go into the medical field. Dissections are an important part of the learning experience but some students are against cutting into a dead animal. This is where online dissections come into play. Students can go online and see the inside of an of an organisms without having to touch it or without having to have an organism die. Also technology can be used to show videos of complex ideas or of experiments that could take years to do. When doing my project I did a PowerPoint in which I used different colors, moving pictures, and different links to demonstrate how technology can be used. The links will allow the class to do different short activities and view different videos. The presentations will be a general overview of the different types of actives that can be blended in to a typical science curriculum. Below is the link to my wiki page which has the link to my presentation. Frank Snyder Wiki Page