Feb. 26-28

This week in ed 205 we worked on our interactive poowerpoint idea and we also visited Pine Island. I've discovered a few things about doing internet research with kids. Primarily, things need to be very well labled. Our Delicious website is slighly unorganized and it makes it difficult to navigate through the loops to find information. I've also discovered that the teacher needs to explain exactly what the child needs to look for. When the kids are looking at websites, they see everything as being important, when really not everything is. The kids should have a specific goal like: find information about 2 animals from the Tundra. Tell what they eat, where they live, where they are found, etc. The internet is too wide and complicated for them to just look at a webpage and try to pull information from it. I will keep this in mind if i ever create a Delicious page for my class.

This week, we had time in the lab to work on our podcasts, and to work on our interractive powerpoint. My partner and I did our podcast about podcasts. We explored why they can be useful in the classroom and across all areas of education. We also added a small clip of a kindergarterner talking to her teacher about why she likes kindergarten. I have begun working on my interactive powerpoint
Thursday, we attended Pine Island Elementary School. It was a great experience to be in the classroom along side of many small minds that do not have much experience working with the internet. It was helpful to hear the kids' questions and to help them navigate through the internet while they researched binomes. I'm looking forward to going back to Pine Island next week.

Week #6

This week in Computers in Education, we were introduced to our topic in technology that we will be creating as a podcast with a partner using Audacity. Jena and I have recorded our findings about using podcasts in the classroom. There are many uses for podcasts across all ages and grades. Kids can learn and hear different material from all across the world. This is an intreresting way to introduce kids to technology and to promote the use of technology in education. Not only are podcasts used in elementary schools, but also colleges, like Grand Valley. Also, we were introduced to the idea of linear powerpoint. It makes powerpoint much more interesting and engaging for kids to view a linear powerpoint with extra charts, videos, pictures, webpages, etc. so that the instructor is not just flipping through slides and lecturing like in college. I'm looking forward to helping the students at pine island with using linear power point as well.

Week #5

This week in Ed. 205 we spent some time working on our digital stories. I found some trouble when I was organizing my images because I didn't know what order to put them in since I do not yet have the recording done. However, once I made notes for what I was going to say for my recording, it was much easier to move the images around. Today, Thursday we used Audacity. It was my first time encountering this program, and I'm glad we approached it in a constructive manner because it was much easier for me to remember once I discovered things on my own. I thought the program was neat, and I'm sure I will be using it often, especially for our partner podcast project. I thought it was neat that you can import mp3 files and then adjust them so that they play at certain portions of your audio. I am interested in this new program, and I hope to become more familiar with it.