Weekly Post - PowerPoint Activities

What?

This week we learned about PowerPoint activities. Our assignment is to get together with our team and create a PowerPoint activity of our own. For our team project we are creating a PowerPoint activity that teaches how to create and print your own matching game.

So What?

With this new skill, I can utilize PowerPoint to make learning activities. This would be a fun way to do an in class presentation in my classes this semester. Most of my presentations involve some sort of activity, and by using PowerPoint it would be a new interactive way of implementing an activity. I've never seen PowerPoint activities done before learning this and I think if I presented this it would excite the other students in the classroom.

Because I am in the practicum class this semester, I am grouped with a bunch of student teachers creating their own lesson plans. I would like to benefit from their hard work and share lesson plans to build my curriculum. I know that I make a lot of visuals for my lessons and activities, and if everyone created PowerPoint activities of how to make their visuals everyone could easily get that file to save for future use. By collaborating with each other it would save a lot of time collecting visuals and other elements of lesson plans.

Now What?

By using PowerPoint, I can start creating learning activities now that I could use in my future career as an early childhood educator. I think this would also be a great collaborative tool as well. If several different teachers came up with their own PowerPoint activities then shared them with each other, each teacher would benefit from the other teachers by sharing these activities.

This could also benefit the parents of students as well. Since I'm going into early childhood education, particularly preschool, I know that a lot of parents want learning activities to do outside of class with their children. By creating a PowerPoint activity that allows parents to learn to create their own activity, it allows parents to create activities of their choosing and gets parents involved in their child's education.

Video

I liked how this girl related her knowledge of chickens to all of the major cores of education: math, science, language, social studies. I liked this video because she liked chickens - not anything grandiose or anything. Just a simple dream of raising chickens that might one day lead to being a veterinarian or something else. It tells me that you can have any kind of dreams, whether big or small, having a small dream is better than no dream at all. I didn't mean to be cheesy and make that rhyme.

Weekly Post - a little bit of everything

What?
Because our teacher was out sick last week, she taught us about Picasa this week. However, I already explored Picasa and blogged about it so this post will be about the different photo editors I use - Picasa, Picnik, iPhoto, and PhotoShop.

So What?
There is another online picture editing program that I wanted to blog about. It's www.picnik.com. I love Picnik because it has a lot more fun effects than Picasa, but Picasa is definitely better in some ways. The free portion of Picnik.com is fun to use, but you have to subscribe to the premium version to have access to ALL it's wonderful features. Also, on Picnik, you can only upload and work on one picture at a time whereas in Picasa all of your pictures can be saved in the program to be used at a moment's notice.

Picnik allows you to edit your pictures in more extravagant ways, which is fun, but I don't necessarily think you would want to edit your pictures to the extreme for everyday classroom use. It definitely wouldn't be efficient to use Picnik for a whole batch of photos either since you can only upload one at a time - it would take way too long.

Now What?
I can see the advantages of Picasa and Picnik, but for me, I will stick to iPhoto for now - photoshop when my work gets more extensive. I think it's most important to know all your available resources so you know which ones to use in different situations. If I needed to do a certain photo edit on an entire batch of pictures I would use Adobe Bridge. If I wanted a quick fun edit on a few pictures I would use Picnik. If I wanted to share entire albums I would use Picasa and if I wanted to do everyday minor edits (on my own computer) I would stick to iPhoto.

Lucky for me, I'm more knowledgeable about photo editing than the average teacher because I have studied photography. I can see myself using all of these different programs in my teaching. I am glad there are free online photo editors like Picasa and Picnik because keeping updated with Adobe programs gets expensive - especially when I won't be able to buy student editions anymore.

Video
Since I've already watched and blogged about all the videos I chose found one of my own
This video is a tour of iPhoto '09.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl8OZXh52RE

I'm not really familiar with iPhoto '09, I'm still in the '06 version, which is when I bought my Mac. After watching this video it is now on my wishlist - along with many other Apple products. One thing I thought was pretty awesome about Picasa is it's face recognition tool. Now iPhoto has the same kind of tool. I'm pretty jazzed. It also has more organizing features, which I really like because I have a lot of pictures between my photography and normal snapshots. For now I will stick to what I have and when I become rich I will blow my money on every Apple product out there.

Weekly Post - Picasa

What?
This week we had to explore Picasa - a picture editing program - on our own. We didn't really have an assignment to go with it because the teacher was out sick and we were just supposed to mess around with it.

So What?
Picasa, like other Google programs, is a great way to share documents over the internet. This will make it easier for me as a student when I work on group projects that involve pictures. I have found that it is really hard to share pictures if you have a lot of pictures that are big file sizes. By uploading them and inviting people to view your web album, they can just copy the pictures they want to their computer whenever they want.

Because I am in the practicum class, I have been taking a lot of pictures that need to be shared with the other teachers. By uploading the web album to Picasa I can share all of these pictures without having to burn them to CDs or copy them to flashdrives. This will make it easier on me and all of the other student teachers. If we share pictures through Picasa everyone can get the pictures they need a whole lot faster and more efficiently.

Now What?
Picasa wil be a great tool for me as a preschool teacher. I'm sure I will take so many pictures and they can't all fit onto a newsletter. By creating a web album and inviting the students parents to view they can see pictures of what we do in class and copy pictures of their own kids to have for their own. This saves from printing pictures which can get expensive when you take so many.

I could also create a "Show and Teach" album, for the pictures that the kids take at home to share with the class. By doing this, the kids could have their parents go to the web album and then the kids could tell the parents about the "Show and Teach" pictures and teach their parents the things they learned in class. This would be a great way to develop language skills at home.

Video
I liked this video. It was funny because it is so true. I think people tend to get carried away when making PowerPoint presentations because of all the exciting things you can do. Less is more when it comes to PowerPoints. I don't mean that you should make 4 slides with a white background and 12 pt. times new roman font, I just mean that it's too overwhelming to choose a theme for each slide and a different crazy font. Make it interesting, but keep it simple.