Week 13- Digitial Story intro

What?
This week we began learning about digital stories. Specific aspects of digital storytelling that we learned about were scripting, narration, storyboards, and the impact that music and images can have in creating emotion and catching attention. Scripting should be done carefully and work effectively with the images used. Music should enhance and emphasize. Storyboards are a good way to get started and organized while creating a digital story. We watched some examples of good digital stories. The one about the Holocaust created a lot of emotion in the class due to the powerful images and music involved. We will be creating our own three minute digital story as groups in our specific content areas.

So What?
Digital stories are great to use in the classroom for many reasons. First of all, they can be wonderful hooks for a lesson or beginning of a new unit. Those brief three minutes can contain a great overview, create real images for students to relate to, cause interest, and begin the questioning and discussion process with students. Digital stories can also reach all kinds of different learners. Visual learners will benefit from the images and words shown, musical and auditory learners will appreciate the music used to emphasize the story, and logic-based students will learn a lot from the facts presented in the story. Hands-on students, ESL students, or others with different needs may really be able to enjoy and excel in making their own digital stories. Overall, digital stories have a lot to offer for our diverse students and their many personalities, interests, situations, and learning styles.

Now What?
My students are living in a world with so much technology and would benefit greatly from having opportunities to use this 21st century technology in their learning and my classroom. As I haven't had any experience with digital storytelling up to this point, it seems a bit intimidating to me. In order to feel more confident in this area, I plan on working hard with my group on this project to make it the best it can be. Collaborating and using the tutorials and examples to guide us will help us learn what we need to do. With practice, I know that I will be able to feel comfortable creating digital stories for my future students. It will be nice for both me and them to have an "out of the box" assignment that adds variety and interest to class. I'm excited to get started!


Video: NASA Digital Story
I thought this digital story gave good information and basic knowledge of what NASA has done, including their accomplishments and losses. I liked having the audio and images of the President's speeches about our goal of landing on the moon because it made it more real to me. Hearing his voice rather than the narrator made more of an impact and impression. The music also played a big part for me, specifically when the story talked about those who had lost their lives. At that point, the music changed to a slower and more respectful feel. The trumpet felt patriotic. It matched the mourning and respect that the world felt for the loss of those lives. The pictures of these individuals helped create emotion in me because I saw that they were real people. I wasn't as disconnected as I would have been had I just heard the narrator tell about them.

Week 12- Technology Articles/Reflections and Video

TECHNOLOGY ARTICLES/REFLECTIONS

SKYPE:

Skype is an online software application that allows people to call one another via the internet. A useful place to find out details about steps for downloading Skype and getting started is a techtorial pdf by Lorrie Jackson titled Skype: Talk to Anyone, Anywhere for Free. This techtorial discusses how not only can people speak with each other over voice-calls, but with devices such as webcams, they can video-call (video conference) other people. It mentions that other useful things to do with Skype include instant messaging and file transfer. This is all free unless calls are made to landlines or cell phones. Skype works with Windows, Mac, and Linux (Jackson). I had fun experimenting with it and found it easy to use.

Pros: Skype has so many benefits for networking, education, collaboration, sharing, and socializing. Teaching Degree.org wrote about "50 Awesome Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom." After looking at all of these 50 possibilities, I organized them into three groups: teacher benefits, parent benefits, and bringing more opportunities to students.

One way that teachers can benefit from using Skype is through professional development resources. It can help in informing and guiding teachers to topics that they are seeking to improve in. It also gives teachers an easier and quicker way to collaborate with other teachers. Sharing ideas and working together becomes much more efficient through this kind of technology. I hope to find other teachers willing to share and collaborate ideas through it. The more collaboration and networking I can do, the better the teacher I will be for my students. Skype can also give teachers more of opportunities to receive feedback on their teaching from other professionals (Teaching Degree.org Blog, 2009).

Skype can be wonderful for parents for many reasons. It can give teachers a new way to share students' work with their parents. Through this, parents can be more informed about the great things their students are achieving in class. Teachers can also have another way to be able to conference with parents. Some parents are busy and have a difficult time making it to the school, so Skype may be a more convenient and enjoyable option for them. Parents can be overall more involved in their child's learning and experience in your classroom through the benefits that this technology has to offer (Teaching Degree.org Blog, 2009). I plan on informing parents of these benefits and encouraging them to take advantage of Skype in order to be more involved in their child's experience in my class.

Lastly, students can benefit so much from the use of Skype in the classroom. Teachers can more easily bring busy guest speakers into the class to offer information and perspectives that the teacher wouldn't be able to convey as effectively. I would love to have Deaf guest speakers know that I would be able to use more of them through Skype than just in person. Teachers can also share educational travel experiences with their students. For example, if I were to visit Gallaudet University or the Deaf Institute in Paris, my students would be able to experience some of this as well through Skype! Students can share their projects and performances to others outside of their class, and they can also connect to people throughout the world. I'd love them to have video-chats with other ASL and Deaf students throughout the country because they would have exposure to so many more signing styles and perspectives. Teachers can also be more available to students for after-school help (Teaching Degree.org Blog, 2009).

Cons: Similar to every other online tool, Skype can lead to privacy and/or safety issues for students in our classrooms when we don't follow certain precautions. To help prevent problems, teachers should have clear and honest communication with those who their students will be communicating with. Skype calls can also cost quite a bit of money if you call a land line or mobile phone, so it is important to make sure you know who your students are calling and that they know the rules on who to communicate with during class (Jackson). Teach students about the importance of privacy and not sharing personal information while using anything online.

I will tell parents that I chose to use Skype in the classroom to enhance their student's signing skills, give them more opportunities to share and receive information otherwise inaccessible, to add a richer level of diversity in the classroom, and to involve the parents themselves.

References

Jackson, L. (n.d.). Skype: talk to anyone, anywhere for free. Retrieved from http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/techtorial/techtorial107.pdf

Teaching Degree.org Blog. (2009, June 30). 50 awesome ways to use skype in the classroom. Retrieved from http://www.teachingdegree.org/2009/06/30/50-awesome-ways-to-use-skype-in-the-classroom/

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Online Dictionaries/ASLpro.com (a video dictionary)

Online dictionaries can be very useful and efficient in the classroom. The specific content area I will be teaching is American Sign Language, so having access to a visual dictionary is very needed in my classrooms. Two good ASL online dictionaries that I have found are ASLPro.com and SigningSavvy.com. I will be discussing just ASLPro.com.

On ASLPro.com's home page, they describe "A Little About What We Do":

"ASLPro.com was created to be a free resource for the classroom teacher. Teachers can create accounts and personalize a quiz for their students' use, then take them into a lab and let them practice seeing models other than their own teacher. Because our signs are designed to be used in student quizzes, Non-Manual Signals are purposely omitted." (ASLPro.com)

ASLPro offers a few dictionaries, being a main dictionary, religious, conversational, and ASL for Babies dictionary. They also include QuizMe! quizzes for everyday signs, religious signs, and fingerspelling. Other free tools they offer are functional groups, shared lesson plans, mouth morphemes, ABC signs, ASL Poems 'N Songs, and games.

Pros: Both StreetDictionary and ArticleDashboard.com discuss several benefits of using online dictionaries, and the advantages they have over printed dictionaries. Compared to printed dictionaries, online dictionaries are much faster to use. If you are unsure about difficult spellings, online dictionaries make finding the word much easier as well (StreetDictionary, 2009). Online dictionaries can be used for free, and there are different ones to use for many languages. Having the option of visual and audio features helps with pronunciation and production of difficult words (StreetDictionary, 2009). Translation features are very helpful as well. Online dictionaries can also be updated easier and more quickly than printed dictionaries. Words and their meanings are very dynamic and can change over time, which is why it is important to update dictionaries frequently. Many also include informal words that printed dictionaries wouldn't (Bell, 2009).

ASLPro, specifically, would be a wonderful tool to use in an ASL classroom. It would be next to impossible to teach students every word they wanted or needed to know in one short semester, so having an online dictionary would be very beneficial to them in discovering words that were not covered in a specific unit or lesson. Being able to expand on and personalize their vocabulary is likely to help them enjoy using the language more, because they would be able to express themselves how they want to more easily. Having access to common phrases can help them practice putting these words together in helpful ways. The games would be a wonderful way to offer a fun extra credit activity or class review. the Jeopardy game, for example, asks questions about ASL History, "Guess Who" questions, and general ASL language and culture questions. Students could also expand their knowledge by exploring the "ASL Poems 'N Songs" section, and this would help include diverse learners and would help add variety to content. Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of ASLPro.com is that students can use it both at school or at home. It doesn't have to be limited to the classroom like some printed dictionaries might. Being able to see a visual representation of the vocabulary can help students learn and review much more than if they could only rely solely on the teacher for this modeling.

Cons: If you don't know how to distinguish a good online dictionary from a bad one, you may get wrong information. It is important to examine and chose an online dictionary wisely. Many of them are also only used as supplements for printed dictionaries and are not as effective on their own (Bell, 2009). Like any other online tool, you should always investigate the validity, qualifications, dates, content, etc. to determine whether or not it is a good source.

As for ASLPro, one setback is that they definitely don't have every word students may want to learn. In their FAQ page, they say that with a database containing thousands of words, they are no longer accepting requests for new signs. They are focusing their energies in other useful areas. This definitely limits the words students can learn or would be interested in. Another aspect that may be viewed as negative by some and positive by others, is that many of the model signers for ASLPro sign things differently than I learned from my Deaf professors and fellow interpreters. There are many different styles, and often times, some signs are used in some places and not others. This may confuse students who learn some words a certain way in my class.

I will most definitely inform parents about this tool and how it can help their students both in my classroom and for practice at home. I will tell them that I chose to use this tool because of the variety of learning tools it offers, as well as for it being another resource for their child to learn new vocabulary as well as review vocabulary that has been taught in class. It is difficult to write down how a word is signed, so if students could rely only on that method while learning new vocabulary in class, they would be much more likely to write it down or remember it wrong. With a visual online dictionary, they can see it being signed and will be able to have a better resource to look to than pen and paper. ASL is a visual language and should have as many visual resources as possible. Hopefully this tool will encourage curiosity, creativity, and diversity in their child's learning.

References:

ASLPro.com. (n.d.). Aslpro.com. Retrieved from http://www.aslpro.com/

Bell, R. (2009). The Advantage of using an online dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/The-Advantage-of-Using-an-Online-Dictionar/633708

StreetDictionary. (2009). Online dictionaries- the universe of words. Retrieved from http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/62233/education/online_dictionaries___the_universe_of_words.html

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Video: ASL Interpretation of "Where the Wild Things Are," by Maurice Sendak (Translation by Charles Katz)



This video would be wonderful to include in an ASL Storytelling unit. I love this video for many reasons- one being that Charles Katz is a master for showing expression and creating visual imagery through his signing skills. He is a great model for my students to try to imitate and use ideas from. I also think this video is a good choice to use because the story is a well-known and favorite children's book for many people that I know. Perhaps some students will already feel a connection and and have memories of this book growing up. This story presents many opportunities for practice in describing characteristics and features (the monsters are wonderful), describing settings (the forest and where the Wild things are), incorporating gestures as well as new vocabulary. I believe students would find it very entertaining and learn a lot from it.

Week 11: Video's, Digital Cameras, Picassa

What?
This week we got to experiment using Picassa. This is a great program to work with your photos in. You can do things like crop, straighten, fix redeye, retouch, highlight, shadow, change colors, focus, blur, glow, sharpen, make sepia, black and white, and many other possibilities and combinations. Picassa also allows you to post these pictures directly to your blog, make collages, email, print them, create slideshows, and more. At the end of this post are four original pictures, then those same pictures edited and changed through Picassa.

So What?
This is a great tool to help keep pictures organized and personalized exactly how you want them. Through using this free program, your pictures can reflect your personality, enhance creativity, create variety, be more artistic and aesthetically pleasing, draw attention, look more professional, and accomplish specific goals you may have had with that picture. Sharing pictures with others can be easy and fun through this useful program.

Now What?
I'd like to continue experimenting with Picassa and continue to get more knowledgeable and comfortable with all of the possibilities that it offers. This may motivate me to be better at taking pictures, which would be very helpful! I believe it would be easy to apply this in my teaching. By taking pictures of handshapes, Non-Manual Signals (facial expressions), and signs, and then editing these pictures to draw the students' attention to specific features I'd like to emphasize, they may find their homework and assignments more interesting and may recall it easier. Visual learners would benefit greatly from having rich and diverse pictures to study and learn from. Perhaps I could even give them a project to take pictures of certain things, edit and personalize them in Picassa, and create a project from it. There can be a lot of possibilities.

Video: Top Ten Things You Do Not Learn About Teaching in College
10- Why are the bad kids never sick?
9- No matter how sick you are, it's easier to come into school than to write sub plans
8- When your students tell you they really have to go to the bathroom, always believe them
7- Forget your college friends and loved ones. Who's your new best friend? Wipes!
6- How to disarm the school alarm system on the weekends
5-You'll get so sick and tired of hearing your last name, you'll want to change it
4- Your fitness program will consist of carrying your bags to and from the school
3- Two words: Differentiating Instruction
2- The principal's office is still scary
1- Always be good to your Superintendent

I thought this was really funny, so I wrote out these 10 points they mentioned (all of which seem have some bit of truth in them, haha). I think it is true that you can't learn absolutely everything in your college classes- some things will probably have to be learned through the actual experience of teaching your own classroom. It's helpful though, to be ready for as much as you possibly can when going into your teaching experience. Paying attention and putting forth effort in college classes will help, as well as talking with other teachers and getting their advice.