Blog #15

Education 422 has been a very valuable class for me. When I first walked into this classroom, I could hardly do anything using technology. I have learned a tremendous amount of things I never knew before. I first would like to say that the video project has been the most fun to do! There are so many things that we learned that I will look forward to using in my classroom. I think the filamentality project would be a lot of fun for the students to do. As a teacher, it is so important to make things fun for the students. Inspiration was really challenging, but I think it is a great way for students to organize their thoughts before beginning a big project. I can definitely see grades fourth on up using this program. I had never worked with excel or databases before, however, I am the type of person who likes to keep things organized, so, I can see myself using these programs to keep data for my students. Powerpoint and rubrics (Need I say more….). Both of these things are very valuable tools for teachers. Powerpoint is a great way to add a visual perspective to any lesson plan. Rubrics are necessary for grading purposes. Okay…Blogs. I’m not making a promise, but, I will probably not be using Blogs in my classroom. For one thing, they are very time consuming, and not everybody has a computer at home! That’s enough about that. I can’t think of anything about this class that needs improvement. I learned so much and I have Erika to thank for that. Erika was a great professor. I liked the way she explained everything in class before we actually had to do it. Anyway, I wish all of you the best of luck in your teaching careers. I’m sure all of you will be wonderful teachers! Yes—No More Blogs!!!

Blog #14

This project has been a lot of fun. It was really great to be able to work together as a team to create such a fun and educational lesson. I thought the planning of the lesson went really smoothly as ideas just poured out of us. The actual filming went pretty well. I can definitely say that I will never become an actor. It was hard to not feel silly while trying to remember my very short line. In the end, the most time consuming part of this project was the editing. I felt lucky to have a couple of people in my group that have edited movies before. The most difficult part of editing is getting the video to line up correctly with all of the transitions, music, and so on. However, in the end, I felt that our project turned out pretty awesome. As far as using this type of project in the classroom, I feel that students could gain a lot of knowledge about not only the subject they are working with, but also about technology itself. The more hands-on the assignment is, the more knowledge the students can gain. After this project was completed, I also started to think about how fun it would be to make a movie to show parents at open house what their children had been doing all year.

The article, Splicing Video into the Writing Process, correlates with the video project we did in this class. The article talks about the importance of preproduction and prewriting, which includes gathering information, concept mapping, consensus building, scripting, brainstorming, researching, and storyboarding. This is an important first step because it is the step that organizes the entire story that will be told. The next step to video production is production. This step includes planning, rehearsing, and filming. This step is important because this is the part the audience will see. It is very important to plan out the entire process, so it can run more smoothly as you begin to film. The third step to video production is postproduction. The postproduction portion covers rough digital editing, class feedback, more editing, adding additional audio, visuals, still, graphics, and publishing. Once postproduction is complete it is time to show your audience. The end of the article has an area called reflection in which teachers state how well video projects work in the classroom. The teachers stated how much the students like to work on a project like this and how beneficial it is to do in a classroom.