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/

Picassa Pictures changed

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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.

Lessons Learned

Before taking this class I thought I was pretty confident in using the computer and the internet. After taking this UNI survey it turns out I am just an apprentice in most categories. This is because I am familiar and have used most of the tools and resources but am not sure on how to implement them into my lessons. I have a lot to learn as to how to apply what I know into my lesson plans as a teacher.

I have learned from reading the standards that it is important for teachers to learn and use technology in their classes and in their lessons. From watching all of the video’s and readings that technology is something that is here to stay and is only going to keep getting more important as the years go by. We as teachers need to be up to date on the things our students are using and know how to help them with these new technologies and apply them to our lessons.

Strengths & Weaknesses

My Strengths according to the Net standards are that I can “implement curriculum plans that include methods and strategies for applying technology to maximize student learning.” My strength according to the UNI survey would be number seven. I have worked as an aide in special education so I have seen a lot of the resources available to help students with special needs. I am sure there are many out there I don’t know about but I feel I can find out about those easily and help my students with special needs.

My weaknesses according to the Net Standards would be that I Teachers understand the social, ethical, legal, and human issues surrounding the use of technology in PK–12 schools and apply that understanding in practice. I know there are a lot of rules as to what goes into technology and copyright and those things but I don’t feel confident in teaching them or know all of them. In the UNI survey number six it talks about the copyright law of 1976 and the multimedia fair use guidelines of 1996. I don’t know what these are and need to look into them. Another weakness I have is I do not know what the ICN is. I have never used it and would like to learn more about it.

A goal I would like to make for myself is to teach my students about copyright and things like that. As a theatre teacher we will be using a lot of resources from the internet for monologues, plays and things like that and we will need to know what they can use and what they have to get the rights for and things like that. Along with this I would like to help the students stay safe and be ethical on the internet. A mini class I could go to is offered on UEN called, Internet safety for educators that helps educators learn about the threats that are out there to harm our students and gives teachers resources that can help them do this. Another goal I can work on is to learn about Video conferencing and how it can help me as a teacher. I found a on-line tutorial at SearchUnifiedCommunications.com that can help me learn more about this. It offers the basics, implementation and explains telepresence.