Authentic Writing Final Project

Often throughout the school year, students are expected to reflect on different concepts and hands-on activities. Blogging would give me an option for the students to post information online. Expectations would be set for appropriate writing skills being used.

VoiceThread offers an opportunity for my students to share their final project designs with others for critiquing. Students would post their designs to voicethread and other students would be expected to go in to each design and provide constructive comments on the projects.

I'm going to talk with the network administration for the school district to see if they can white list 21classes.com for my students to use. I like its simplicity and privacy for just your class. The staff I work with may use this if they saw how simple it truly is. However, someone would have to set everything up on the blog site so they would just have to post their comments.

Emerging Instructional Technology - Podcasting Reflection

Today we had the opportunity to design and develop a podcast for our final group project. Dr. Zeitz went through and explained the importance of making sure our podcast was developed appropriately for a RSS feed. I like his analogy of podcatching and podcasting to fishing. I have a better understanding of these concepts.

I was wowed by the ease one could create a podcast in GarageBand. It is just a short series of steps to include your audio and than add your bells (jingles) and whistles. I found two elements of this process to be more time-consuming than the rest. These were modifying your audio, so it reflects exactly what you desire and writing the script. One needs to truly understand exactly what their objectives are in producing a podcast in order for it to be a successful product.

At the end of Dr. Zeitz's lecture, he shared some podcasts he considers beneficial for us to listen. I appreciate this sharing to give me some guidance to which podcasts may be more appropriate for me to spend my time listening to.

We had a couple of specialists today share with us how to use voice thread and how we could implement it in our classroom. What a phenomenal tool! I can see it being used in my class when the students critique each other's capstone projects and network designs. Students can reflect on the quality and possible functionality of the networks as they are designed.