Using Technology to Teach

This week's assignment was really fun and informative. We had to create a movie using a camera, movie maker, free play music, audacity, PowerPoint, and the Internet. We used my unit plan on "How do we distinguish letters and sounds?" As we were trying to come up with ideas on how to use these tools, I thought about how students can use the tools to do their projects and how they can incorporate it with inquiry based and/or project based learning.

Just like writing a research paper, we had to plan for the movie by using a storyboard. We went into the unit plan and looked at what needed to be addressed in the movie. The focus of the video was to inform teachers of how we can use technology and books, as well as, utilizing word walls to teach children how to distinguish letters and sounds. We also addressed the use of running records to assess children's knowledge of letters and sounds.

We used power point to make various informative slides and saved the slides in jpeg format. Next, we took video, using a camera, of different types of scenarios that pertained to the unit plan. Some of the video footage we took were longer than others but it was OK. Once we were done shooting the video clips and making the slides, we uploaded them into movie maker. In movie maker, we were able to edit the slides and the video clips. We were also able to add narration using a microphone and add transitions between the images with the video transition feature in movie maker. We were not able to use the free play music website and the audacity website but we did play around in the sites and downloaded the audacity creator. With audacity, we were able to record our voices and other sounds but since we were limited on time we just recorded the narration using the record sound feature on movie maker. When were done editing the movie we uploaded the movie file on to teacher tube and waited for teacher tube to create an embedding code. Once we got the embedding code we were able to post it on our blogs.

Because of this project I learned how to use all the different tools I listed above. I worked with someone who was very interesting. We had quite a few things in common. Which is also a good tool for teachers to think about when they want to incorporate social skills into any project. Technology is definitely the way of the future for learning.