Internet Safety~ March 28

In learning about Internet safety I was very impressed with the importance to educate our students about the dangers that come when using technology. While there are many benefits to using the Internet that we can teach students the negatives need to be clear as well. It is important for our students to know about the unlawful activity that they sometimes unknowingly engage in. By creating the different medias of information for our students to gain information about Internet safety we can more effectively teach all the different things we want to. The newsletter can be given to parents and the brochures can be more quick reading for students to get the facts quickly, while the flier could be posted around the school or passed out to spread awareness.
By giving students more information about Internet safety we will be able to stop a lot of the activity that students engage in that is inappropriate and damaging. By spreading awareness many of the things that students do when they are younger and unaware can be eliminated. I am looking forward to educating students about this in order to create a more safe environment in my classroom and in the school in general.

March 15~ Digital Stories 2

Last week we learned more about Digital images and copyright laws. This information is very helpful, because as teachers we can't expect our students to not plagiarize if we ourselves are doing it. While for the most part our educational resources will not be checked by a board of people seeing if we took material from other sources, it is important to bring new ideas and activities to the table. We can use some material, images, etc in our lessons and examples for students as long as we give credit to those sources. As long as we are doing our best to not cheat the system we can expect the same from our students.
In creating our digital story we have found ourselves filled with ideas that will take up a lot of time and space, and we are trying to figure out how to weed down our ideas. In searching for pictures for the story we have had a little difficulty getting away from the Disney pictures, but having more mythological images will help make it more realistic and take the students' minds off of the Disney version as much of the little mermaid. We are still trying to figure it out, and trying to keep those copyright rules in mind!

Digital story 1- march 7

This week we learned a little bit about digital stories and how we can use them to evoke emotions and teach our students about the things we want to. It is helpful to use emotions every so often in the classroom especially in language arts because deeper conversation will occur that can cause new thoughts and greater learning. As a future english teacher I plan to use emotional learning and connections with my students to create foundations of trust in the student-teacher relationship; once that relationship is founded students can feel more comfortable with me as their teacher as well as in the classroom community. I enjoy focusing on more light hearted things for the most part so our digital story is going to be evoking those happy emotions in those who see it. I hope by putting a happy spin on this assignment we will be able to be a more enjoyable and fun for the students.

Vidcast- March 1

Post- Production:

I created a vidcast with Rebbecca Moreno about Shakespeare as an introduction to starting one of his plays. We created a photostory to create a more professional presentation of the information we were giving. In studying Shakespeare the class will cover many parts of the core curriculum, most strongly in Standard 1, objectives 2 and 3. We will be analyzing his words used in his plays, the format in which he presents those words and what it all means to us today. In studying the historically relevant works of Shakespeare we can bring in modern ideas and words that come from his work over his lifetime. Everyone is able to find meaning in Shakespeare's works that relates back to them in their lives, I hope that through this small introduction we can help students to slowly find their own connections after further study. We wanted to choose a topic that we would actually use later on in our teaching careers. Shakespeare is a safe bet for a subject covered in a Language Arts Classroom. In creating something so modern to teach about someone that seems so gone in the everyday lives of students we can use technology as a tool to showing that Shakespeare does in fact live on today. In making it as short as we did we will be more likely to keep students' attention than if we had created a twenty minute presentation for the same topic. Along those lines though, we do lose a lot of information in cutting the vidcast so short. Shakespeare deserves much more than under two minutes of our time, so it would be our responsibility to treat this only as a short introduction, not necessarily as a learning tool. I hope to create more vidcasts for my classroom to utilize in the coming years, as I see it as something that students can benefit from seeing and creating themselves. It would be interesting to have students create something like this for one of their assignments. If this had been slightly less formal I think it would lend itself to allowing students to show more of their personality through their work, while still meeting the criteria.

Pre-Production

In creating this vidcast I felt that we learned a lot about all the different tools that are available to us as teachers. There are so many options that we can use in many productive and effective ways to teach our students and to benefit all different types of learners. While there are any ways that we could have taken this assignment, we have decided on an introduction to content in which I believe we will be using a photostory. The other devices taught to us in class also seemed like they could find a place in my classroom. By having so many different tools being used and available to us, we are better able to keep students engaged in the learning taking place and the content being covered.