Sharon Rose's Blog

week 14

sharongal — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:29:29 +0000

My last blog post. How the time has sped by. I’ve liked blogging about ED 217.

We wrapped up class with the final project. Using myebook.com, a site where you could make a book online, we had to create a E-book about the modules in this course and what we had learned (or lackthereof). Myebook is a complex but neat tool. Building the book from scratch, Dr. McCullough showed us assets which included covers, backgrounds, and effects; how to put in photos (and frame them), videos, and audio; how to add text and change the font; and how to add hyperlinks, called “hotspots.” Dr. McCullough also showed us the ISTE National Education Technology Standards. Every standard he hoped we had learned in class, and wanted us write about one standard we had learned in each module.

I really enjoyed doing this final project. It was fun to be creative, and have an oppurtunity to look back over everything I’d learned in class. I know a lot of the tools covered in class will be useful for the rest of my time here at Clarion, and for my professional life.

Farewell!

Photo taken by pasos de ciego

week 12

sharongal — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:25:36 +0000

Thursday we completed our module 3 project. We used the program JayCut to make a video about four friends who have an interesting adventure on Halloween. Keirsty made the characters from another program (Gimp, I think it was) and intergrated them into the photos. Jimmy did the captions for the slides. Susan found some really good sounds and music that I think took the video to another level. I helped with putting the slides in order and inserting transitions. We made a good team and I think we all enjoyed working with each other. The project turned out well, too.

week 11

sharongal — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:24:25 +0000

This week we finished exploring digital story tools in ED 217. First we visited myebook.com, a site where you can create a e-book, a comic, and even a photo album. Next was yudu.com, another site available to create and publish a book online. A third option, wobook.com, also allows you to make and publish e-books (or wobooks). For all three sites Dr. McCullough said we could upload files to create an e-book instead of starting from scratch.

A final site we looked at was jaycut.com. This is a video editing programing, which you can use to create a video by uploading photos and audio. You can add text as well as transitions between slides. A neat program.

week 10

sharongal — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:12:27 +0000

ED 217 continues to be full of exciting exploration! Dr. McCullough led us to a number of websites we can consider to use for our collaboration project. First was www.classroom20.com, to point us to Ning, a collaborative tool that lets you to create and join new social networks. Such as cuped217.ning.com, a network for our class! I admit I didn’t find this tool very appealing.

McCullough stressed we can’t use commercial music in our project. So instead we can use a program called GarageBand (sadly, available only on Macs), where we create our own music/songs with music called “loops.” We can save and share the music we create as mp3 files. Very cool.

The “Fantastic 4” project is slowly but surely coming together. Halloween…haunted house…Scooby-Doo…

Photo by sir_watkyn

week 9

sharongal — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:43:38 +0000

Collaboration tools is what we started learning about it ED 217 this past week. First we looked at Wikis, a type website which can be created and edited by a number of people. Even Blackboard has its own Wikis! We also played with EtherPad, an online site that lets you collaborate in realtime; and TinyChat, an online chat site you can also use to collaborate.

To give us a chance to really learn how to use these tools, the third module assignment is a group project, creating a digital story. Dr. McCullough showed us mixedbook.com, a very neat site where you can create photo books online, and order it as a real book if desired. This is one way we can make the group project — after planning and writing the story first.

I admit I’m not a fan of having to work in a group. It is just not one of my favorite things. Yet this experience will be good for me. As I hope to enter the library science field, I’ll have to work and cooperate with others. This assignment will help me develop those skills more.

Photo by lindseyy

week 8

sharongal — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:07:37 +0000

This week we worked on completing and submitting our productivity tools assignment. I choose to create a PowerPoint guide on Kenneth and Mamie Clark. They were African-American psychologists whose research was used in the famous U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) when segregated schools was ruled as being unconstitutional.

I confess I found this assignment pretty challenging. The layout of PowerPoint available on the lab computers differs quite a bit from the version I use at my dorm. It was hard switching back and forth between the versions, finding where features were again.Yet I enjoyed doing the assignment the more I worked on it.

For some reason I could not create hyperlinks for my list of resources. I’m think I did it correctly the first time. Yet when I played the presentation they did not work. I attempted to correct them but nothing I tried worked. So in the end I got rained on sadly.

week 7

sharongal — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:54:47 +0000

Dr. McCullough briefly talked about how much he disliked PowerPoint, when presenters just stand to the side and read off the slide word-for-word while occasionally glancing towards the audience. Those presenters should have taken a computer class I had at a community college. The final was to create a PowerPoint and present it to the class. My teacher ordered us not to read from the slides. We could use index cards for cues, but we were to talk more about what wasn’t included on the slides. We were to speak to the audience…not the wall.

This was our introduction to PowerPoint as we explored some of its features today. Dr. McCullough showed a non-linear presentation: pictures twirling in, stupid cats racing across the screen, sounds filling the air when the mouse moved over a word or photo. These were all “action” features that could be added to a PowerPoint. Some of these features seemed vaguely familiar while others I did not know at all. The most fascinating part of class for me was learning to create a “central” slide with hyperlinks to other slides in the presentation, and a “go back” link to the main slide — very cool compared to the traditional way PowerPoint. Of all the exploration we’ve done, today was the most exciting. Now I have to decide whether to use PowerPoint or Webspiration for my project…

P.S. In the last two days I’ve used two tools I learned about in ED 217 for business and school: Google Maps and Delicious. Thank you, Dr. McCullough!

week 6

sharongal — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:52:38 +0000

I have definitely fallen down the rabbit hole, gone into the wardrobe, driven through the tollbooth…and whatever other ways there are in which one enters a strange, magical world! This week in class we learned about a final productivity tool: Prezi. To paraphrase Dr. McCullough, it is a sort of mix between PowerPoint and Webspiration. He used the word “lost” a lot in class yesterday, I certainly was, especially when he let us get lost on our own!

With Prezi you can create a zooming presentation from scratch. Instead of usual tool bar, there is a bubble menu that turns and zooms in and out when you click on different features. You can pick the background, put in text (that you can rotate!), media such as pictures or videos, and decide the order you want to present your “slides”, to name just a few of the things you can do on Prezi. I was completely lost navigating this tool, feeling like I had fallen into some weird place. It was a relief when we finished exploring Prezi; I doubt I will visit it again.

Photo by Torley

week 5

sharongal — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:22:03 +0000

This week in ED 217 we’ve started exploring about desktop productivity tools. We learned about Inspiration and Webspiration, two versions of a program where you can create diagrams, outlines, and templates. In class we have just played around with diagrams. I have no experience at all of making diagrams, so these last two classes have reminded me of when I first learned how to swim. I am still finding my way around, discovering what makes Webspiration tick. While slightly overwhelming, I am overall real excited by this new tool.

One thing Professor McCullough stressed in class today was that we only use images for our assignment that are not copyrighted. Because if we do we will be breaking the law. Rather than hop over to Google images, searching for photos at Flickr is a better choice. There you can do an advanced search in “Common Creatives” which only brings up photos that it is okay to share and use. I think that is a great feature.

week 4

sharongal — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:06:12 +0000

This week in class we wrapped up learning about online tools with social bookmarking, being able store, organize, and search web pages with “tags,” keywords or category labels. One social website we visited was Flickr.com, a site where users can upload and share their photos with the internet world. We explored the most popular tags used to label photos there. Another site we looked at was delicious.com, a site where users can save and share their bookmarks with others. I really liked how when I did searches on delicious, the results were good quality websites. I was even able to search multiple tags to effectively narrow my search to what I wanted. This is a very good site that I think will be one of regularly visited sites.