So once upon a time I came across this awesome song by Jon Schmidt. I very much love his other songs, but I think this one might be my all time favorite! It's Love Story (Taylor Swift) Meets Viva La Vida (Coldplay). I hope you all enjoy it as well! :)

Digital Photography

Today, was AWESOME! I had tons of fun! Which is a good thing since I didn't get much sleep and then had to come to class. We played with digital cameras today, taking pictures of various geometry stuff and then we had to make little comic book pages explaining what they all were. We used a program called comic life for this. It was neat. It was pretty easy to figure out as well. Course, it helps that I know a little bit about photo shop, and the programs are a little bit similar. My pages turned out awesome too. However, I can't for the life of me figure out how to attach them on this computer. But I promise they look neat. :) This could be a way fun activity to get students involved with. I think they would learn a lot, and enjoy it. It's an attention grabber, and keeper. It's definitely not something kids will get bored with. So, after teaching them the concepts, you could have them do what we did (take pictures of something that describes the concept, like parallel lines, and then make a comic page of it explaining in their own words what parallel lines are) to assess their comprehension of the topic.

Web Applications

Today we did an online reading tutorial for 4th and fifth graders. The voice of the girl on this tutorial really bugged me, but other than that I think it's a great tool for teachers. When students have some free time, or when the class goes to the computer lab, something like this would be really good to use to help students reading skills. It's a new look at how to figure out cause and effect. I also liked that if you gave a wrong answer, it told you why it was wrong and then told you what to look for to get the right answer. And it gives you lots of practice which is also a good thing. A weakness that I found in this tutorial is the voice of the character. Her voice really really bugged me. But, for all I know, kids wouldn't mind it. But if I were to change something about it, I would make the voice a little bit more realistic and not so monotone. I think that would make it more exciting for the students using the program.

IA Projects

Today we learned about making IA (instructional architect) projects. It was very interesting, and seems like it's going to be a lot easier to do the second lesson plan for this class. It's also pretty fun to search for things at NSDL. You can search for all grade levels, and by being able to do that, it saves teachers a lot of time in that we don't have to come up with the entire idea all on our own. We can take someone else's idea and adapt it to fit our own students/classes. Thinking back to my practicum last semester, I had a few students that could have used an active online project to help them with certain concepts we were trying to teach them. I'm actually a lot more excited to do this other lesson plan now that I know about and how to use the IA. It's much easier than the webquests we learned about last week!