Dracula by Bram Stoker Inspiration

 I thoroughly enjoyed the Inspiration. Its especially fantastic for the overview of a novel or works of literature as a whole. For instance, I did mine on Dracula by Bram Stoker. I realized that with these diagrams you can make them look as "mature" or "cartoony" (if that's a word) as you want to. I loved it! This is something I will definitely make use of in the future if I have access to a MAC...if not, then oh well ....PC it is! The only thing I didn't enjoy was having to keep it in a certain space for the screen shot...I felt to trapped in one set area.

Scavenger Hunt Project

Slideshow design customized with Smilebox This Blog assignment was both positive and negative for me. I love the idea of taking pictures that go with a lesson (hopefully something I can us in the future) the part I did not like was uploading the photos to Smilebox, because the photos were zoomed in too much and they looked blurry. I could not get them to look the way I wanted to. However, if I can tweak the uploading portion of the photos, I can feel more comfortable with the project. Or I may allow students to be more free with how they use their pictures. By doing this, I can give the students the option of doing projects in multiple photo friendly tools....I mean, that is the advantage to choices of Web 2.0 tools!

March Blog Assignment

For the March Blog assignment, my favorite blog is The Innovative Educator by Lisa Nielson. Lisa Nielson has multiple specialties in technology tools and speaks so educatedly and bluntly about how she feels about today's education (especially since she has 10+ years experience). Lisa Nielson creates this fantastic blog where she literally states things that I think or feel daily. She speaks about the way schools, alot of the time, do not preprare students for the real world. Also, she talks about how absurd it is to ask students to remember things all the time, while in the real life you spend the majortiy of your time looking things up. Therefore, its more important to know how to find answers than knowing the answers themselves. I thoroughly enjoy her blog. She speaks against so many "stereotypical rules" in the classroom that almost ruin students when they get into college, or worse the real world. Also, her layout is really cool. She has the typical blog where you can scroll down and see earlier posts. Also, she has twitter updates constantly popping up on the right side with great links to technology for teacher links. Also, she is constantly posting helpful or explanatory videos under her blogs. Therefore her audience is for the technology teacher or the teacher tired of stereotypes.  Overall, I found Lisa Neilson's link extremely entertaining and meaningful for my futrue career as a teacher. I look forward to using other teacher's thoughts and experiences to my advantage in my own classroom. However, I will have to be careful to take the correct advice:) Its amazing the resources we have today that allow us to access so many useful tools.
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/

Digital Image Activity

(See previous post for my example)Images will have a huge use in my classroom. So many students are visual learners, thus, images make learning so much easier and more accessible. Also, images make learning more fun and interactive. Digital Images (pictures that I took) probably will not be used as much. I mostly only take pictures of my family or friends -- things that I do not necessarily want to show in class. Screen shots are also not things I will use to much in class, except for assignments. If I have assigned students an inquiry based learning or another assignment using the web, it would be helpful for students to see the website that they will be accessing. As for scanned photos, they can be both fun and useful. So many things from books or non digital images have to be scanned. Therefore, scanning is definitely something I will have to enlist in the classroom. Web images are probably the things I will use most in the classroom. They are actually the types of images I used most in my classrooms right now. I love searching the web for images that can coincide with my assignment or interests. These are also the easiest type of images to use in the classroom. Google images, for instance, is one of the easiest sources for images...even more so that digital images on a computer or camera. Lastly, CD collections feel a lot like clip art to me. If students need pictures like these, I believe that in the classroom or on homework assignments I will just suggest they use clip art on the Word Processor.

Digital Image Collection