Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Oops here is the link, sorry.

Link to podcast.

http://goldrushaudio.blip.tv/rss

Intro To Authoring Tools Podcast URL

Hi,

Below is the URL to my Digital Audio project podcast for Intro to Authoring Tools class. Although the URL name is gold rush audio there are three episodes in my show which is called Karen B's show. I messed up on the rss feed title. I hope you enjoy them.

http://goldrushaudio.blip.tv/rss

Karen

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Digital Audio - Gold Rush

Here is a link to my digital audio about the gold rush

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Week of 8/ 6 - 8/10

This week we had to create a WebQuest as our project #2. I worked with two other classmates on it. They are middle school social studies teachers so we focused on that. It was fun but more work than we thought :) I was down the shore on vacation with my son's laptop working on it. While I missed some sun at least I didn't have to stay home - kudos to online learning!

We decided on the topic of Ancient Greece and comparing Athens and Sparta. I think it is a fun and interesting subject. We used some videos which are awesome to have to offer. I believe it turned out good. I hope they are able to use it in their classes. I will check with our social studies teacher to see if she can.

This week we also looked at freeware/shareware that can be used for education purposes and sites that have educational grants available. I found a really good program that is geared more for high school (algebra, geometry) but there are parts of it that I can definitely use. My fellow classmates also gave me some great sites for both that are posted on my website.

Week of 8/6 - 8/10

Ooops this was a duplicate.

Friday, August 3, 2007

More thoughts - week of 7/30 - 8/3

A few thoughts on Web Quests. For the lesson and project #2, I have been reviewing many Web Quests this week. This is another teaching tool I did not know existed before taking these Ed Tech courses, hence I have not used them yet. I think they are a great way to get students going and, as Dodge says, involved in active learning with the web. It is awesome how you can link multiple subject and sharpen their technology skills as well. I will be trying to figure out how I can use one or two of the math ones I looked at or creating my own :) this year.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Week of 7/30/07 - 8/3/07

This week so far I have discovered quite a few new tools that I had not known about before. Some are Inspiration, GIS, globe.gov and using podcasts in the classroom.

Inspiration, www.inspiration.com was intriguing. I did not download it but did the quick tour, which didn’t work too well, and reviewed some of the examples for math. It reminded me of when I created process flows showing step by step activities for placing customer orders. They were painful but boy did you learn the process when you had to create them! This tool seemed much easier than the one I used. There was a flow for adding fractions, which I liked. I am not sure if it would be confusing to them but I am thinking that some would learn if they had to actually create the process using this tool. It seemed like it would be a fun way to reinforce for those struggling.

The GIS site, www.gis.com was interesting. I put in my zip code and it gave demographics of my area including average income, race, cost of homes, family information, etc. This would be good to use when I get to interpreting and creating graphs. We can graph some of this information for different areas.

The www.globe.gov site had information about some global projects that have been done by students. There was a lot of information on this site. I zeroed in on classroom tools, maps and graphs, then classroom activities. There were puzzles and quizzes. The globe maps and puzzles was really cool. It gives you bright colored maps of the globe or continents, which are broken into pieces; you scramble them and then put them back together. It was fun. From here, I clicked on google earth and downloaded it. One of my students had showed me but I was not able to take the time to really look at it. It was awesome! I found my house and my mom’s. I also took a sight seeing tour which showed places like Disney, the RMS Queen Mary, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas !! The Eiffel Tower was really amazing! I loved it.

Lastly, I went to google and looked for information on using podcasts in the classroom. Since I was familiar with it, I checked out Education World’s information page http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites074.shtml . It was great. It had a few simple ways to get started and gave some brief but informative information on how to use podcasts in the classroom and linked to some examples. I listened to a few. This would be great use to have students create a step by step processes (maybe on Inspiration) for a math concept and add the voice podcast to it. Again learning by creating it and it can be used for other students to view and hear.

These links are all be available on my website resource page.