Smartboard

After reading about smartboards and using them in class, I have a new appreciation for computers yet again. I think smartboards are a great tool to use to enhance a lesson. They are a terrific way to get students involved and out of their seats. I found it fun to come up with different games and activities on smartboard. There are so many different things a teacher can do; the possibilities are endless!

There are three main parts to using a smartboard; touching, writing, and saving. By using a finger, a teacher can control directly through the board, like a mouse click. The smartboard also acts like a whiteboard and has a pen tray that senses which color marker is picked up and when the eraser is picked up. Smart notebook is another tool that can be used to write notes and draw diagrams. All notes can be saved in the notebook file, just like working straight from the computer. Smartboards come in various sized boards and also have a smart keyboard accessory along with hand-writing recognition.

I enjoyed working in smart notebook in class. I loved the hot spot game along with reveal boxes and all of the interactive parts from the lesson activity toolkit!

Group Video Project

Our group video project was a really great learning experience for me. I have never created my own video online using movie maker. I thought movie maker was fairly easy to use after we knew what we were doing!

It was a lot of fun coming up with a current social issue to create a PSA. We ended up picking the very new issue of children on reality TV. We focused on "balloon boy" for our video clip. We found a ton of online articles and video clips about this family and the balloon incident.

Since this is such a new issue, we did, however, have a somewhat difficult time finding any statistic about how harmful reality TV can be to children. We found that we could relate child abuse and mistreatment to this particular story for our statistic.

We really enjoyed filming our movie. We used a silver balloon and barbies to help re-create the story. There were some things we would have done differently, such as; filming our story in order. For some reason, we just thought about different aspects of the story and filmed them in the order we thought of them instead of filming them in the order they actually happened. This made it more difficult for us to arrange our clips and cut them at the right place. We also would not have talked while we were filming! We were having so much fun and got a bit carried away with our talking, not thinking about it being recorded.

All in all, I thought this was a really great learning experience for me. I learned how to use movie maker, download movies, pictures, and music, edit clips, and incorporate transitions. This would be a fun project to do with a class to really make a lesson or unit come alive!