Digital Story 3 & Final Exam Introduction and Video Reflection

Today was a day to keep learning about digital stories and how we can improve them. But, we also talked about our lesson plans and what those need to be about. At first I was very confused but now I see that you want us to think outside the box. We need to be as creative as we can so we can help our students the best we can and get them engaged. They must be engaged in what we teach or we will lose them. Technology and using many outlets will keep them engaged and doing fun things while learning.

I guess what I learned from today was that I really need to think about my past and future lesson plans and involve media and technological influences in them. Learning that now and putting them into my practice lesson plans now will help me in the future. I think it also helps me to think about how I can use technology for my everyday living too. My younger sister came up to me yesterday with help on an assignment and I was able to help her using new media tools and she loved it. I can help people even now to prepare to be a technological teacher.

From all of this, my student will be using technology and will want to in my classes. Therefore, I will need to keep that in mind while doing lesson plans. I really feel like it doesn’t have to be big projects but adding simple technology will help them too. It will keep them engaged and will excite them for more technological things we do in class in the future if I can help them enjoy it.


Video: Why We Need To Teach Technology in School

Click here for link

I found this video searching for one talking out technology in school. It is very simple but it gets across a point. It tells teachers they need to use media in the classroom or they will be left behind. It shows how improvement in technology in the past has changed so much and how it will continue to grow and we need to keep up and help our students keep up too.

Digital Stories #2 and Did you know 3.0

I am having a lot of fun working on the digital stories. I really enjoy photostory and how easy it is to use. Working as a group helps too. We are working collaboratively on this assignment that makes it easier and we help each other when we get stuck on an idea. We all give our input and are able to make the digital story even better. I like the tools available with photostory in making our digital story look great.

Photostory is a great free service that I can use in my other classes and share with my other colleagues to help them make their lessons better. We can learn this technique to help us be better teachers in the future. Photostory to me is a lot like PowerPoint but I actually like photostory better. It is easier for me and you can do a lot more it seems with it to help teach a concept in a new an interesting way.

I am excited to introduce photostory to my students when I am a teacher so they can make their own digital stories. Since I will be teaching Drama I will have a unit on scriptwriting. They could write a script and make a short movie out of it using this program. They could find pictures to represent what their script may mean to them and go along with their script. I really didn’t think that I would use media like this in my classroom but know that I know about it I can see the value in using it. The students will have fun and will learn while they are doing it.

Did you know 3.0
This video has a very interesting point of how influential technology is in our lives. It not only is so very impressive now but it will only get more impressive and we will be more involved with it than ever before. This tell us as teachers that we should incorporate technology in our classroom because that is what our students will be used to. We should also do this so we can keep up with our students and their technological knowledge. They will be able to teach us things I am sure and we should include their technological skills and abilities into our lessons.

Digital stories #1 and Nasa Video

This week we took a look at digital stories. I have never learned about these before. I really feel they will be great tools for our students. I think having us make a digital story in our content area will be good for us and give us a chance to understand what they are and how we can use them for our students.

In my classes now, I can use digital stories to help improve and give ideas in writing my lesson plans I am coming up with. Also this will be very helpful to me as a theatre education major so I can learn how to use this technology now before I get in the classroom and the students want to make videos and things like that. I have never made a video like this before so it’s going to be a great experience making one and learning how to do it.

This is going to be a great tool for my students in theatre. When they are trying to come up with an idea for a script they can use this tool to make a storyboard for their own scripts. It will also help if I teach a film unit. They can make a mini movie with a digital story. They can research playwrights and do digital stories on them. They can also make a digital story telling a plot from a play they we may be studying, not only giving the plot but pulling out some ideas from the plot and presenting an interesting point the play may be bringing up.


Video:

The video we watched this week was a great example of what our students can produce for a good digital story. I think it was very well done. It posed a good question and let us know about things that we may have not known before. I didn’t know so many astronauts have died. I think the music went well with the story and enhanced it very nicely. I enjoyed the video and I am not a science person at all. I think these digital stories will be good to make to help our student enjoy the subjects a little more.

Technology articles and Educational video

This video will be very helpful when I teach movement lessons. This woman is very good at pantomime and will be a good starting point for the students to see a very good mime at work so they can see how it is to be done. I think it will be interesting for the students to watch and bring some differentiation into the lesson too.

Technology articles

Skype
In the article “Skype Use in the Enterprise” it says that “Skype got its start as a virtual Internet phone company and owes much of its growth to the fact that users can make free calls to other Skype contacts regardless of their location.” Skype is a free downloadable tool that now comes with many computers. If a computer has a web camera built in anyone can use the free service of video to video calling with any other person who has it too. Not only this, but you can call people’s landlines with Skype but there is a fee attached to this. For my purposes of education value, I would just use the video calls that would be free.

When students learn to act whether it be performing a monologue, scenes or pantomime they love to get feedback from other students. Students can assess each other but I think if we as a class could use Skype to talk with other schools (like pen pals) and perform our monologues or scenes for them this would be a really neat concept. Students would be able to watch how other students from different parts of the state and country or even internationally are performing and what they are learning. In return in can be beneficial for the other students we will be working with too. This is just one benefit of using Skype.

Another idea of this is that students who have Skype at home could use it to communicate and even work with other students in the class on their performances. This is all from the comfort of their own home, or wherever their laptop is! In an article, “7 thing you should know about Skype” from www.educause.edu/eli it gives this experience a college has had using Skype,
“Faculty at a Tribal College in Arizona developed a project to collect oral histories and build a library of recordings of Native American languages that are disappearing. Students from the linguistics and history departments participating in the project interviewed members of dozens of Indian Nations across the United States and Canada and made digital recordings of those conversations. Traditional long-distance phone service was relatively expensive, and cell phone coverage for many Native American reservations is spotty. Nearly all of the reservations included in the project had at least one satellite Internet connection, however, and the organizers of the project decided to use Skype to conduct the interviews.”
These students were able to use Skype to further their education and I believe that it will be a tool that will be used a lot in time to come.

In the same article,“7 thing you should know about Skype” it gives us some ideas on what the downsides of Skype are, “The sound quality from Skype is not as consistent and reliable as that of landline or cell phones. Skype also raises a number of concerns about security and resource consumption.” I would also add that not everyone will have a computer with a web camera and therefore couldn’t participate from home if they needed to.


“Skype Use in the Enterprise.” Tech and Trends. October 9, 2009 • Vol.31 Issue 25 http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3125%2F32p25%2F32p25%2F32p25.asp

“7 things you should know about...Skype” Educase Learning initiative . December 2007,
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7032.pdf

Virtual tour of Globe Theatre
In Utah students are able to participate in a competition every fall down in Cedar city, known as the Shakespeare competition. Students get to learn Shakespearian monologues and scenes and one acts and go and compete with other schools from around the state. The students look forward to this time of year and it helps them feel a sense of accomplishment whether they win or not.

Before the students participate in this competition I feel it is important to have the students study Shakespeare and his time. I want them to understand the time period and what it would be like to perform back then with the same pieces of theatre they will be performing. To help in this endeavor or teaching these students what it is like I found a very helpful website that is a virtual tour of The Globe Theatre.

The Globe theatre is where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. The Globe theatre was actually burned to the ground during a performance of Henry VIII. But, “The foundations of the Globe were rediscovered in 1989, rekindling interest in a fitful attempt to erect a modern version of the amphitheater. Led by the vision of the late Sam Wanamaker, workers began construction in 1993 on the new theatre near the site of the original. The latest Globe Theatre was completed in 1996” (Shakespeare Resource Center)

Because it would not be cost effective to take the students to London to see The Globe theatre this website I have found can let the students go on a virtual tour of the theatre. It shows the theatre from different perspectives. It lets the students see how the theatre looked back in the day of Shakespeare. After seeing what it looks like, It might be fun for them to think about how it would be to act on that very stage. Or even think about what it might be like to be a audience member. The poor people actually got to stand in front of the stage and the rich people got the balcony seats. The students can see all of these perspectives on this tour and will have fun virtually being at the Globe theatre. Now this virtual tour is just computer generated and not real video of the actual theatre so it’s not the best and lifelike but I think it is good enough to have the students go on and see what it looks like.


References
Shakespeare Resource Center, http://www.bardweb.net/globe.html

Shakespeare’s Globe, Virtual tour. http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/virtualtour/

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Digital photos and Top ten things You do not learn about teaching in College Video

This week learning about digital photos and Picasa was great. I haven’t worked with Picasa very much. I think it’s a great program that can help you enhance and work with pictures you have taken. I enjoyed enhancing and changing the pictures I chose to use on this assignment. I think it is great that we can crop the photos to focus on what we want to. I am not the best photographer so it helps me!

This past week I needed to take an image I received and crop it. I tried to figure out how to do it and I didn’t have Picasa on my computer and I didn’t even think to use that. If I had had this lesson a week earlier I could have used that to crop it! Now I know where to go for all my cropping and enhancing of my images needs. This lesson of digital cameras can come in handy with my other classes if I need to do a presentation that I have to take pictures of the students I am teaching and things like that.

I can use this information we learned this week as a drama teacher a lot. I will be putting on plays and taking pictures of the students during their plays, scenes and even monologues. It will help them see what they look like while they are performing and help them with their acting. Picasa also helps you make your photos look better. This will come in handy if your pictures come out with red eyes and you can take that out. I can also have the students take pictures of their classmates while they are performing and help their classmates become better actors. I really am excited to use Picasa in the future.

Top Ten Things You Do Not Learn About Teaching in College

I really enjoyed the video this week. It showed some things that are true and funny. Since I am just learning to write lesson plans I can see how #9 is very true. It would be easier to come into school than to write a sub plan when you are sick. I’ve tried to make my lesson plan applicable to anyone who reads them but still, for drama some the sub probably couldn’t perform a pantomime for the class when I am doing a direct instruction lesson plan.

My Beliefs

Before taking this class I didn’t think that using technology in my lesson plans was that big of a deal. The only thought of technology use in my class as showing video clips of performances and things like that to my theatre classes. After reading the Net Standards I see how I can and must implement technology in the classroom. I know see there are many uses in the class. I can get them to do blogs, do webQuests for projects and prepare PowerPoints to enhance their learning.

These students we are teaching are all about the internet and having media with them at all times. In the video clip millennial generation we see how important technology and having it with them all the time is. Since this is the case it is imperative we apply this in our classes. In the article, “The New WWW we see how students need technology or they will be bored. They are so used to using it in daily life that if we don’t implement it in our classes they could get bored. I really do now see how important this using these tools in our teaching is. We need to keep up with the times and use those things that will help our students learn the best and I think technology is a great way to do this.