Final Blog Posting

This course has provide numerous learning opportunities throughout this semester. My favorite project that we completed was the ComicLife activity. I found that this was a great tool to use to present information on different grade levels. I teach 6th grade Social Studies and my curriculum is extremely difficult for this age group. Using a program such as ComicLife enabled me to take difficult information and transform that into something that 6th graders would be interested in viewing and still meet my learning objectives. All of my students gave positive feedback about the comicstrip that I created for this project. I will definitely use ComicLife again!
I also greatly enjoyed working with three of my classmates to complete the PBL project. Sometimes I feel like I am missing out on the interaction with my peers by completing coursework primarily through distance learning. This project provided a chance to work with classmates that doesn't always exist in an online learning atmosphere.
This class has consisted of alot of hard work, but I believe the benefits will prove to be well worth it.

PBL and Group Work

This project provided a great opportunity to collaborate with my fellow classmates. Each of my group members teaches a different grade/content area, so we each had a little different interpretation of what our approach to this project should be. I believe that our final project displays a little bit of each of our ideas. I had never used GoogleDocs before this project, and I must admit I was a little hesitant. Using Google was a good way to share immediate information with each group member--but the planning documents, where we were discussing ideas, quickly became cluttered and difficult to follow. This is an opinion that my other group members also shared. It was also difficult to work on a project that focused on a content area that I am not familiar with. At the middle school level, teachers become so engulfed in the content that we teach, that we are not familiar with what is going on in other content areas. Overall, I enjoyed working on this project--I had a great team! We were all willing to listen to each other's ideas and make sure that elements of everyone's ideas were included in our final project.
Using PBL activities can be a great teaching tool for teachers and provide students with valuable opportunities to learn using a different technique that they might be used to. PBL also provides students with an opportunity to investigate topics on their own which enables them to practice searching for accurate information.

Movies with Movie Maker

Movie Maker is a very user friendly tool. It is very easy to add photos/videos and arrange the order in which they are to be displayed. Movie Maker also allows for adding music and sound effects; there is a tab that lets the user select where to insert the sound. Unfortunately the version of Movie Maker that is available for Windows 7 does not provide a tool for recording within the program. This requires the user to use an outside program such as Audacity. Again, the Audacity program that is compatible with Windows 7 is still in the development stage, so getting the program to work properly was difficult.

Movie Maker can be used in numerous ways in an educational setting. It is a great tool for presenting information, as I did for this project. But, it could also be used by students as a way to present information.