[Week 10] Experience from Ebistro

http://ebistro.org/index.html

---------------------> this is the website has different kinds of activities layout the form of WebQuest. It was impressive that the website was creative, theme as restaurant, also well organized with all the activities that we did throughout this class.

However, I did not really like this website. As the first visiting this website, I did not really know what kinds of information each section has - so you need to play around to figure out. If I was the owner of this website, I should add one sentence explanation underneath the title to let people know what kinds of information each section has.

[Week 10] Useful Websites

http://www.thinkfinity.org/

----> this website has four different categories for different age or standard group, Educator, Students, Parents and After School. Each category contain several sub-categories: activities, games and homework. Also teachers can find the sample lessons plans. So not only for teachers using the website, but also other groups also get helped from this.

[Week 10] Projects for My Future Class

Technology projects that you could do as a teacher to enhance your classroom for your students

1. Tech Newsletter

2. Voice Thread

3. Smart Board

4. Glogster

5. Online White Board

6. Digital Story Board - Slide Share, slide.com

10 projects (1 a month) that you could have your students participate in that would promote project based learning or just plain fun if you had your dream classroom

1.Big Huge Labs

2. Voki

3. Google Docs

4. Wordle

5. Interactive White Boards

6. Google Earth

[Week 9] Podcast

Podcast is a collection of individual audio episodes typically recorded and edited on a computer and then uploaded to a web server.

People can listen to the podcast using ipod or the computer. This will help with people, especially students. For example, they could record the lectures from school and put on their ipod to listen while they are outside or they could practice in language (pronunciation). Not only creating by themselves, they could download podcast that others created and uploaded in the internet.

Not only for studying reason, podcast could be used to communicate with others on their life or the areas they are interested and share with others.

They could record on daily life, like interesting events to share with others.

Because in the process of creating the podcast, people uses the different digital tools to edit and put the musics, this helps to be the digital native as well as the better communicator.

[Week 8] Portfolio

These days I am working on the portfolio which is due on Week 10.

We supposed to put all the works we did throughout this semester. This is great to organized the works with different categories - because the blogger, we cannot organize the work with different categories, they organized automatically the post by post time. Also having a hard time to find right information - we should click several times to find the right post.

For the Google Site, we can put the pictures, different types of documents, it is easier for me to upload every work. However, one thing I do not really like about that site is that we cannot upload the video from our desktop. They only allowed upload the videos from YouTube (maybe others can upload the video from their desktop but I don't). If they allow users to upload the videos easily (like blogger), that would help me to create the portfolio more easily and professional. Furthermore, because the site is the place where you share your ideas or information, they could provide more choices in fonts.... there is no pretty fonts and because I am keep using the "Georgia", this makes my site not interesting.

[Week 8] VoiceThread

http://voicethread.com


This is the website where you can communicate with other throughout leaving the word comments or the left your voice comments. Not only for the communication, this could be used in variety areas such as digital storytelling.


One teacher has created the digital storytelling using her students' art works. She has commented that "The VoiceThread was a wonderful way to demonstrate the children's work and also have them identify vocally what their drawing was about."

-------some images from her storytelling using VoiceThread

She just asked her students to draw a picture on the topic "What they are doing day to day?" and record the students voices with comments on their picture. She scanned all the art works and organized with the voices to create the storytelling.

This could be another way to create the digital storytelling also way to demonstrate student's beautiful artistic works to their parents.

This is the great website to share or get ideas from others on how they teach their students.

But people should have some equipment such as microphone or the headset that can record your voice.

[Week 7] Xtranormal

http://www.xtranormal.com/

The Xtranormal is the website where you can create a animation - you can choose characters, backgrounds, sounds, script also you can direct the camera angles too. This could be another way for create a digital story.

The teachers could use this website to address the ideas to students also students could do the presentation using this.
Most classes, students create a power-point or the poster, and give speech based on the information they have put. However, if students use this website to create a presentation, this will be fun for students to create also other students could pay more attention during the presentation - Students could write the scripts based on the information they want to present.


This is not hard to use however, there are some limitations or the areas the website could improve. They have little choices on choosing characters or the backgrounds. In addition, on the way the character reads, the sounds like robot or the machine that reads. If they make the voices more realistic, the video will be more fun.