Digital Imaging

This week we worked with digital imaging. Specifically we use digital cameras, worked to resize them, and use Picasa and Google Presentation to share them. I think images are a great way for me to reach my learners. Being in special ed. it will help greatly to give students a visual image or representation to go with the things we are learning in class. I learned a lot through these activities, mostly with saving them and the importance of resizing them. I did not realize the amount of space photos take up and how much space can be saved through resizing. These are important things to know not just as a teacher, but also in general with my own personal use with images. There are so many things students can do with digital images. They can use them to create presentations, share with their parents what they are doing in class, or with digital scavenger hunts. As digital imaging becomes more and more common, it is increasingly important that they learn these skills we did in class to be able to do things with the pictures they take. Also I think it is important they see how easy it is to manipulate photographs so they see why it is important not to believe every photo is authentic. A lot of times in society images are altered to make people look good or bad, for marketing, or just to trick people. Knowing to research a suspicious photo is very important in today's society.

Slide Show Presentation

Digital Scavenger Hunt

This week we went out and did a digital scavenger hunt.  I thought this was a nice way to do something different in a class.  I think it gives student s a chance to do a fun activity, but at the same time expand their thinking.  Some of the things on the scavenger hunt were difficult to think of something to take a picture of and it made us think critically about it.  For me as a special educator, I think it will be important to have activities to help students think critically because they may have trouble doing so in the classroom.  This digital scavenge hunt is an activity that I can see myself using for my students.  I thought another way to encourage students to think more critically is to tell them their picture wont count unless it is different from all other groups pictures.  This would force student to think outside of the box even more.  I do think that this activity would not be suited for young children, but for older students I think it will work nicely.  Also it is important to trust your students to walk around the school gathering these photos.

Not only is this a good activity to help student think critically, it also has student do work with the a picture editing program after.  This is a nice way to link to extend an activity and have students get experience with a photo program with pictures they worked hard to gather.  This part of it completes the assignment and give the students a way to show of their pictures.

Wordle

This week a new Web 2.0 tool was introduced to us, Wordle.  With Wordle the user is able to create a word cloud which is a group of words put together in random order and direction.  I did not really like this tool because I do not see it being very useful.  I can see myself using it maybe as a different way to display the names of students in my class, or help students see which words show up most in a speech, but I do not think Wordle has much use past this.  Not only do I not see much use for Wordle, I think that it is too difficult to share your word cloud with people.  It is nice that you do not need a Wordle account, but this also means the user cannot save their word cloud or share it easily.  The options you have if you would like to share your word cloud with others is to print it or take a screen shot.

As far as the presentation of the tool, I thought the group did a nice job especially for having to go first.  I see it will be helpful for my group to walk through the presentation on our own before presenting to make sure we do not come across any problems like this group did with Java.  Also I realize that it takes a lot longer to create a Glog on Glogster than it took to create a word cloud on Wordle.  This means we are just going to have to get the class started, and I think we should keep the whole class working on creating the same exact Glog so they can stay on task.  Also this will better ensure that we get to show them the things that we feel are important.  We can share our artifacts at the end so the class sees what a finished Glog looks like since I know they will not finish one in class.

Web 2.0: Glogster

This week I worked with and explored Glogster.  Glogster is a website where users are able to create an online poster.  I thought Glogster was a good tool for classrooms because it allows for all students to be able to create interesting posters.  Creating posters is an activity used in every subject area and in almost every grade, and Glogster offers students a new fun way to create posters.  If my classroom has the technology for all students to get onto Glogster, I would definitely use this tool.  Another cool feature about Glogster is that students are able to add videos, sound, and pictures to their posters.  This makes the posters more interactive and interesting than traditional posters.  As a special education teacher some of my student may not be able to make actual poster boards so creating one on Glogster would be an excellent substitute for them.  For this reason I am going to be sure to keep Glogster in mind when having students create projects.