Online Learning Module

Today, I created my first online learning module.  I chose a topic about which I have become passionate:  Prezi in the Classroom.  I chose to use a blog to deliver my instruction and organized my lessons into individual pages within my blog.  Each lesson requires a response that can be posted as a comment.  The module itself should take a grand total of about two or three hours to complete and provides learners with an overview of Prezi, many practical uses of Prezi in the classroom, an introductory how-to, examples, and the opportunity to create and share a Prezi. 

I find that the more I use Web 2.0 tools, the more I enjoy them.  I love the many ways I can adapt these applications to meet my needs, and I see a plethora of uses for so many of them in the classroom.  Prezi is only the beginning. 

Glogster

While searching for help applying the connection between Universal Design for Learning and Web 2.0 digital tools, I came across this Glog on a Wiki.  It is fraught with resources that can be put to good use providing access to the general curriculum for all students by simply utilizing the web-based tools available to all teachers.  Enjoy!

Fine tuning Prezi...

Circles - parts, measurements, and geometry on Prezi

After doing a little more research on how Prezi can best be used, I decided to apply it to a math lesson I am teaching this week.  I am looking for feedback on my use of the Prezi features in this presentation.

Prezi Presentations

Volcanoes on Prezi

I was just introduced to Prezi earlier this school year by the Technology Facilitator for my school.  At the time, I found the concept to be titillating but feared I would not be able to think outside my linear "box" in order to construct a meaningful presentation using this format.  Indeed, when I chose to make my frst attempt, I began with a PowerPoint presentation I created for a science unit I taught during my internship.  However, once I started working with Prezi, I found out that it is an enjoyable experience that gave new dimensions to my linear designs.  I look forward to a long and exciting relationship with Prezi!

Digital Movie Making in and for the Classroom



This is the 21st Century.  Students today are expected to be able to collaborate, problem-solve, and create products.  The world they will enter when they graduate is one in which minimum-wage earners will not thrive and where the ability to correctly answer a multiple-choice question will be irrelevant.  This is the technology age, and children are attached to devices such as iPods, video game consoles, computers, and smartphones as often as they are connected to people.  They will need to be able to manipulate, process, evaluate, use, and produce media throughout their lives. 

The new digital literacies are developing to help prepare today's students for the world of tomorrow.  Where does digital movie-making fit into all of this?  First, today's teachers must understand that a student body of individuals who have been inundated by images, light, and sound since birth will not be receptive to or retain information from the lectures or drill-and-kill teaching methods utilized on us.  Our instruction must be quick-paced, colorful, and exciting or we will be tuned out.  Today's students may actually gain more from a three minute video clip we prepare than from a twenty-minute paper and pencil activity.  Moreover, http://www.p21.org/ lists competencies that today's students will need that can be gained through the planning, design, and production of video within the classroom.  Skills such as collaboration, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving can be learned through real, tangible experiences such as video production. 

Whether or not we are ready to face the truth, reality IS that students are already producing video and other media and sharing it through social media outlets.  If they are to develop the critical judgment skills they will need to survive in a mediacentric world, we must provide them opportunities to learn them.  As teachers, it is our responsibility to teach and hold our students to high ethical and netiquette standards.  How, then, are they to learn  and use these standards if we do not give them opportunities to create and publish in the classroom?  In today's school, it should not be only the students in the broadcasting courses who are using this technology.  It should be all students.

Attached is my latest creation intended to incite interest in the mountain region of North Carolina.  This short video could be utilized in the North Carolina 8th grade social studies classroom.  Students should then be assigned other regions of the state and challeneged to produce their own digital media works designed to inspire tourists to visit other parts of the state.

Volcanoes, a PowerPoint Presentation

VOLCANOES


Volcanoes by Melissa Townsend is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Social Bookmarking...WOW!

Until this week, my technologically-slow self had never heard of social bookmarking.  Now, I'm in love with it.  For years, I have bemoaned the sad state of my Internet Explorer Favorites.  They are hard to organize and not accessible except from my personal laptop.  Thanks to http://www.delicious.com/ and http://www.diigo.com/, I will never have to struggle with either of those issues again.

Social bookmarking allows me to not only store my bookmarks on the web; I can "tag" them with keywords that will help me sort and filter them when I need to locate only the ones, say, on math strategies.  I may also highlight text I may want to find again and leave notes or comments about my sites and the sites of others.  Since the bookmarks are stored on the Internet, they are available to me everywhere I may work instead of limited to one computer.  Furthermore, with social bookmarking I can share my links with others in my network and access their bookmarks as well. 

My personal social bookmarking sites can be found at http://www.delicious.com/mdt0430 and http://www.diigo.com/user/townsendm07.  As a new user, I am exploring the benefits and disadvantages of each of these major social bookmarking services.  Both have similarities and differences, but I am only beginning to get to know them.  More comprehensive analysis of both services will come later.