Check out this PowerPoint

I have been a user of PowerPoint presentations as a teacher for the history of my teaching career, not because I like them as a learner myself, but out of necessity to accommodate the visual learners in my classroom. At first I needed A LOT of help even putting together a simple PowerPoint. It was comical really. Most of my help came in the form of eager advice tidbits from my seventh graders. I have to admit that my PowerPoints were not interactive, were very straightforward and had no animations, transitions or even pictures. I was satisfied with merely getting a presentation completed.

As a student I have had the agony of sitting through countless presentations that are the ideal model of how NOT to do a PowerPoint. Too many words, no interaction, you name it. Essentially I believe that some use PowerPoint as a replacement for teaching. Class becomes an experience of a teacher clicking through and reading through slides. That is not instruction. Anyone who can read can do that. This has heightened my awareness and attentiveness to creating presentations that are used as a resource and are informative yet do not completely replace the instructor. I couldn't quite get a handle on how to narrate this presentation that I am linking to here, but if I could have, I would have, in addition to what you will see on the screen, added a lot of my own thoughts to supplement the online images and text. I hope you still enjoy the presentation. I have it in my google docs so here's the link!

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B3LUU23gb0rUNjZmYmJlY2UtNzVlNy00NDNhLTllYjYtZGVkZDc0NDllMTU1&hl=en

Digital Poetry

I find the melding of images and poetry to be fascinating. I enjoyed viewing the work of Thom Swiss because one could "read" his poetry numerous times and never have the same outcome. My poem is nothing like that, very linear because I lack the technical know-how to create something interactive, but I think it would be neat to learn how to do something like that.

I see the use of digital poetry as having great potential in the classroom particularly with middle and high school students. I think they'd really enjoy the experience of finding images to compliment text. By using hypertext, or doing something similar to what Thom did in his work would be really exciting.

While images are powerful, I do feel like when the author chooses the images to go along with a text, it takes a bit of the ability to imagine away from the reader. When I read things, I like to imagine in my mind how things look, how they unfold, and when the author does that for me, it takes away a bit of that ability from me. I liken this experience to going to see a movie that was based on a book. I may have imagined characters to look and behave one way, but the director and producers interpret things differently than I, and the characters might be nothing like I had hoped, leaving me sadly disappointed.

Due to the visual nature of the assignment, I had a lot of trouble completing the task. Someone else had to fit the pictures with the text, size the images and insert transitions for me because iMovie is not visually accessible to me. As a student in a class, being asked to use iMovie might be a very frustrating experience because it takes the student's independence away to a degree. I have not, as of yet, come up with a more accessible video production software though, so iMovie might be, at this time, as good as it gets.

Nevertheless, I hope that you enjoy my poem. It is entitled, "Today on Facebook" and is an original poem I wrote while in a class with Thom Swiss. I wrote it during the period of class when we were studying list poems, specifically Shards of Memory and how playing with time and fragmented ideas can be formatted into a poem. I used actual fragments of statuses from my own facebook profile. You'll have to excuse the blurriness of some of the pictures. They also were taken (mostly) from Facebook, but true to life, sometimes profile pictures on the site aren't exactly representative of top-notch photography but rather shotty cell phone pics.

A comic about an non-comical time

Using Comic Life I created the following comic strip about our family's Christmas 2009 experience. I kid you not, our entire family came down with the flu within about 3 minutes of one another and were up the entire night before Christmas doing laundry and cleaning up after sick kids. Needless to say, Christmas was not very jolly at our house last year. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this year is a bit more joyful in the Johnson household. I enjoyed using Comic life and I could see how kids could really get into this as well as they weave together images and text to tell a story.

My husband and I are actually hoping to teach a class this summer about graphic novels/comics to elementary and middle school students. My husband, being the more graphically-savvy guy is going to be in charge of helping the students create their images and I will be coaching them in creating complimenting text. It is an eight day course for elementary school students and a five-day course for middle school students. We are really looking forward to it. We're hoping for success, especially given the recent attention being paid to Graphic Novels as an exciting new literature genre.

I promise...

Hi everyone,
Okay, so finally I figured out my whole podcast issue. You can listen to the podcast at:
http://teachermomof4.podomatic.com/entry/2010-11-08T18_35_51-08_00

As for this week's assignment, incorporating the use of podcasts in the classroom, I thought about this quite a bit. Here are some things that I thought would be good ways to use podcasting.

-For a few years I had the kids create a radio show complete with different segments (school news, weather, sports, commercial breaks, jokes, etc). I tied the preparation part of the radio show into researching different topics and writing different stories (focus on journalism and technical writing). The kids would rehearse and then record their shows and then we'd listen to the completed show as a class via a cassette tape. A lot of the kids would ask for copies to share with parents and the copying became so tedious that often times it just fell through the cracks of the piles of stuff that one must accomplish as a teacher. I see podcasting as a very easy way to eliminate the hassle of making multiple copies of the finished product because as a teacher I could just provide the link. Additionally I think this is great because the sharing doesn't have to stop at the classroom level. More parents can hear what we are doing as a class.

-Along with the radio show idea for sharing work completed in the class, I feel like this same mechanism could be used as an avenue by which students could really share any kind of writing. I think it is so great to hear students read their own work because it gives a voice to their work but it also allows the students to hear their work read out loud. The use of podcasting would be a way for students to read their work and, again, share it with others via a link. Parents, family members and other students could hen hear what students are accomplishing. I think this could be especially cool for poetry because reading poetry aloud is a skill that I believe helps students develop their fluency and I love hearing students read their own work, giving voice to their own words.

-One of the projects I used to do with my students was a Legacy project for which I had students interview a member of an older generation about how times have changed, what school used to be like, what their childhood activities were like, advice the older generation would give to younger kids, etc. The students would then take the interview and create a written story from it. I believe that the interviews could just as easily be done and used to create podcasts. Not all students have access to individuals with computers/Skype but for those that do, they could use Skype to record interviews or record directly into Garageband or Audacity.

-Each quarter I gave the students a list ofoptions that could be done as "Quarter Projects". All the project options required some use of language arts skills but varied from creating posters to performing skits. One of the options was to read a book, or a portion of a book and create an audio recording of the reading. I think it would be neat if students would use Audacity or Garage band to not only read aloud the text, but add multiple tracks/layers, adding sounds to enhance the story, or read with multiple people to create an engaging read aloud. Then the final projects could be posted for others to hear.

Now that I'm teaching at the college-level and don't always have an extended period of time during which I get to engage with my students, I struggle to come up with ways in which podcasts would be helpful. I supervise practicum students in their initial experiences in elementary school and then each week students turn in a weekly journal reflection. I can see how asking the students to complete their weekly reflections using a voice thread would be advantageous but because of the personal nature of some of the things which students take up in their reflections, sharing these journals wouldn't be something that I would suggest via podcast.

I know you were waiting...

Hi there!!
I know you were waiting anxiously to hear my first podcast. Here it is!!! Visit me on PodOmatic!

http://teachermomof4.podomatic.com/

The podcast

So I really liked making my podcast. Once again, I struggled with choosing a topic, but once I did, I felt really comfortable. I took up the topic of book recommendations. I LOVE talking to people and finding out what they are reading/have read/would recommend, both for themselves and for children. So my podcast was called "Love Books?" and it highlighted four books that we hold in our library at home, and that I recommend to others. The first one that I cover is a book appropriate for infants and toddlers related to bedtime routines. The second features Mo Willems' pigeon and his hotdog adventure. The third book, appropriate for middle schoolers, teens and adults, "The Hunger Games," is a page turner for readers representing a range of ages, and at first wasn't a book that I thought I'd ever fall in love with. Finally I selected a book, "The Soloist," that is a great non-fiction adult book. Don't you want to hear the podcast?? Me too... but I'm still trying to work out the sharing part of the project so though its done, it is still secret until I can figure out how to share it with you!!! To be continued!!!

IMovie and Podcasting

So for this week's adventure I explored iMovie. I really struggled with a topic for a movie because I'm not in a classroom (besides to observe practicum students) and no other part of my own life is that exciting that it is worthy of a movie. I wanted the movie to serve a purpose as well. My son was just diagnosed with a Pervasive Developmental Disorder about two weeks ago. For those who may not know what PDD is, it is a category that includes Aspergers Syndrome and Autism, probably two disorders most of us in education have at least heard of, if not have dealt with in the classroom. As a family we are trying to find ways to help our son deal with social outings, particularly those that are a break from his routine, which can be extremely challenging. Because Halloween was coming up, I decided to create a movie "social story" for McKail to prep him for what to expect during our Halloween weekend. McKail would then be able to watch the movie repeatedly, see himself and hear his name in the movie and know what to expect. The use of social stories is pretty common place in working with children with these types of developmental disorders. I wish I could say that our Halloween was flawless, which I can't, but McKail did love the Social Story and perhaps it did help out! It may seem very elementary in the word choice and the flow, but that is how social stories usually are; they are meant to be very simplistic but very reassuring at the same time.