Well tonites class was a real blurr.
The first part of the night was a whirlwind of what is coming up in the next month-I wish Al would follow up with an email as a follow up outlining the information.
Tonites project was a video shot with a cell phone illustrating the dangers of your digital you's. My group and I had fun with it, the learning clearly illustrated the skills that we have been working on to date. One point that I was really happy about was that we were able to work so well together that we finished the assignment in one night. Yahoo!
AS far as my personal growth and development in this course is going I am continuing to implement my learnings back to the classroom when I can. My students are now engaged in a 2 tier project. (ofcourse using computers) As far as my reading of Don Tapscott, I have been finding many connections to what I am reading regarding Growing up Digital and how children are connection online and representing themselves in many different ways. Beware of what you post on the Web about yourself.
Part 1. My students are creating a story to show me how well they are able to organize their ideas in a sequential order using Kidspiration and Word, the finished product is a mini book with text, pictures and other.
Part 2. My students expressed a real interest in the Halifax Explosion, so we did a guided Web quest to find out as much as we could, I also highlighted the importance in questioning if the website was a safe and accurate site, the students decided that it was safe to stay with websites that they were familiar with like the CBC and NS Museum website. After the research part of the explosion they are to write a letter to their friend describing what it is like to live during and after the moments (immediately after) of the Halifax Explosion.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Project Course Outline redo for the 21st Century Learner SJAM
Well since the last class in December I have not written much, it is kinda a waste as there is no feedback or interaction, like chatting with yourself, no fun. that is not too say that I have not been actively reflecting about my learning, I have been rereading our class articles and have been reading the book Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscott, I bought my own copy! LOL
I have been enjoying the book very much, I had to get used to his writing style first! There are many areas in the book that he did not really touch on the various Youtube interviews with him that I have watched, I am also really noticing how OLD his book is - I think that it was published in 2007. ( I have to go and check now I forget!)
Nonetheless, the project we have been working on - creating an online and paper version course outline manual - for the last week was dreadful, the group work aspect was ok, but the work was a huge undertaking, especially when it came time to do the combining of all the pieces into one document from the other partners.
The first issue I was faced with was bringing together all of the different pieces with different style font, and other variables, into looking the same from beginning to end. There was also the struggle with totally redoing the formats so that the project appeared as a cohesive piece. UGH! All of the pictures had to be resized, most of the pics had to formated, so that they stayed in position, also, some of the styles did not stay the same from the Word compatible version and the Word 2007 version,
Well at first I felt that I was not learning anything new with this assignment. Nor did I feel that this was a meaningful project, however after spending upwards of 20 hours on this task, I do now feel that I have learned quite a bit as far as the difficulties working with groups on an assignment like this, where formatting is so important, I geuss if not everyone has the same programs ie. versions of Word, this is the underlying problem.
I have also learned that compatibility is a very serious concern in the 21st Century as far as how a document may appear depending upon different computers and servers and browsers.
Making a document look professional and visually appealing to a specific audience is a great challenge that I struggled with as I attempted to come up with a solution to both. If only I had more knowledge and experiences with word processing of this nature. Certainly to create a document that is hypertextual at the same time is challenging .
I feel that the audience we have targeted for this Course Outline will/may scoff at this attempt as they have experienced electronic documents created by their peers who I feel have better skills in this matter, or even professionals that clearly have had more experiences in this area.
My closing thought is that this type of document creation requires a great amount of creativity and skill with digital media. The final document that we have created to this point is not as far as I would like to take it, however I do not have necessary skills to get the Outline to the level that I want it to be at this point.
I have been enjoying the book very much, I had to get used to his writing style first! There are many areas in the book that he did not really touch on the various Youtube interviews with him that I have watched, I am also really noticing how OLD his book is - I think that it was published in 2007. ( I have to go and check now I forget!)
Nonetheless, the project we have been working on - creating an online and paper version course outline manual - for the last week was dreadful, the group work aspect was ok, but the work was a huge undertaking, especially when it came time to do the combining of all the pieces into one document from the other partners.
The first issue I was faced with was bringing together all of the different pieces with different style font, and other variables, into looking the same from beginning to end. There was also the struggle with totally redoing the formats so that the project appeared as a cohesive piece. UGH! All of the pictures had to be resized, most of the pics had to formated, so that they stayed in position, also, some of the styles did not stay the same from the Word compatible version and the Word 2007 version,
Well at first I felt that I was not learning anything new with this assignment. Nor did I feel that this was a meaningful project, however after spending upwards of 20 hours on this task, I do now feel that I have learned quite a bit as far as the difficulties working with groups on an assignment like this, where formatting is so important, I geuss if not everyone has the same programs ie. versions of Word, this is the underlying problem.
I have also learned that compatibility is a very serious concern in the 21st Century as far as how a document may appear depending upon different computers and servers and browsers.
Making a document look professional and visually appealing to a specific audience is a great challenge that I struggled with as I attempted to come up with a solution to both. If only I had more knowledge and experiences with word processing of this nature. Certainly to create a document that is hypertextual at the same time is challenging .
I feel that the audience we have targeted for this Course Outline will/may scoff at this attempt as they have experienced electronic documents created by their peers who I feel have better skills in this matter, or even professionals that clearly have had more experiences in this area.
My closing thought is that this type of document creation requires a great amount of creativity and skill with digital media. The final document that we have created to this point is not as far as I would like to take it, however I do not have necessary skills to get the Outline to the level that I want it to be at this point.
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