the end

The semester is coming to an end, and we just finished up our smartboard presentations. I was really amazed at the things that we are able to do on that thing, its incredible. I really enjoyed coming up with ideas that would have the students come up to the smartboard and letting them move things around on the screen. It was fun, and I hope to have a smartboard in my classroom when I get a job.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class this semester and feel that it will be a big help when I do get a job. It really taught me how to use a lot of the technology that is available today and now I will be able to use these tools in my classroom.

Smart Board

Now that we are finishing up with the Powerpoint segment of the class, we are moving forward to work with smart boards. I have only seen a smart board used one, and it was during my days as an elementary education major. A kid used it for his math lesson and it was really cool to see the things that could be done on it. I imagine the el. ed. students really get to work with smart board a lot, but being a secondary major we don't really get to work with it at all. Hopefully this class will teach me a little bit about the smart board and how to do some of the cool things it is able to do, otherwise I would probably never learn how to, unless I got a job in a school that had smartboards.

powerpoint lesson

Today I presented my powerpoint lesson to the class. Overall, I think it went well, it is hard to simulate an actual classroom because there isnt much interest from the other students. I feel like it was a good lesson to teach, especially because the Constitution is such an important part of the United States. I think I did a pretty good job of asking questions and having the students answer them to the best of their knowledge. One thing I thought of after I was finised was to have the students tell me the goals they heard listed in the Preamble after we watched the video and then questioned them about them, rather than just going right into it. Thats something I can work on for when I actually get in a classroom of my own.

jeopardy

Last friday we played copyright jeopardy during class and we got to use that little touch pad thing that when you have the pointer close to it, it appears on the screen for you and you can just click and it clicks on teh screen for you. It was pretty cool to see how it worked, and it is a good tool for teachers to use, especially for students who have some sort of disability and might not be able to go up to the screen. Jeopardy was very fun and it gave me some information that i never really knew about before. Especially the questions that dealt with the people only using a few seconds of someone elses song and they were being sued for it. Copyrighting is an interesting topic and I never knew it was as serious as people getting sued for only using a few seconds of someone else's work, but I guess I would be angry if someone stole part of my work.

We have now moved on to the power point section for the class, and we are getting ready to make lesson plans to teach to the class using Powerpoint. For my lesson, I plan to teach about the PreAmble to the Constitution. I got the idea from the teacher I was with for my Early Field Experience. She did something that I really enjoyed, so I am going to do something similar to what she did. Luckily I have worked with Power Point before so it should not be too difficult for me to create a lesson. The only thing I might struggle with is adding a video to it, but I think I will be able to do it. Hopefully I can make the lesson interactive as well, because if not i will not get full credit.

videos

We presented our videos to the class, and everyone had a good topic. Thankfully Adam was in my group because he was really good at editing the video. My job was to find cool background music and sound effects to add to the video. My other job was to be the main character in our video which I did a great job at. Probably gonna win an oscar for my performance. I enjoyed the videos everyone else in the class made, they were funny/informative.

I liked the video that did the poll about how many people could find Greece on a map, I thought that was very clever.

We are starting powerpoint stuff now, which I have used before, so I will be able to do projects without having a problem, or without having to ask too many questions.

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Last week we spent the whole week of class in the library media center. We were working on things such as editing video and music. I had never really done any of that stuff before so again, like everything else we do in this class, I wasn't very good at it. After a day or two of it, I got the hang of it, but it was really confusing at first. I think learning how to use those programs is a big advantage for a teacher, because I will be able to make short videos for my class to watch on specific topics we will be covering throughout the year, and it will be something fun for the students to watch, rather than always looking at a book.

Also, on Friday we had to turn in 3 excel activities that we completed and we had to discuss how we could use them in our classroom. I did 3 fairly simple activities, but they all were able to be modified so that I would be able to use them in my classroom eventually.

Our next project is to make a short video with classmates, be able to edit it, and add music and sound effects to it. I am working with Mike and Adam, and our video is going to be good, Mike came up with a good idea and we all agreed that would be our topic.