Interactive Whiteboard Reflection

I had a lot of fun with this project. All during high school, as long as teacher was in the room we were allowed to play with the Smartboards in the classrooms. We started by doing silly things like simply drawing pictures or playing solitaire. We moved on to free flash games on the internet and so on. During the last semester of my senior year, my friends in a tech class began showing me some more of the features of the Smartboard, such as creating your own activities. I learned a few of the basics. Our Edu Tech class picked up right where my friends left off. I really liked the built in templates, in particular hot spots, and quizzes. I could go on for pages of all the ideas I have for these templates. I really see no reason why I wouldn't use some of these interactive activities. They are so innovative and hit so many different senses which students use to learn, I think the class will be much more engaged and participative.

Do schools stifle creativity?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/11/03/robinson.schools.stifle.creativity/index.html

The speaker poses an interesting argument. I'm still wrestling with it, so I thought everyone might like to share in my struggle.

Video Project Reflection

Overall, I was happy with the outcome of our video project. All the scenes were relatively easy to film. We had a issue with one scene with the time lag between Jessica sending me a text message, and my phone receiving it, but that was simply a minor inconvenience. The greatest difficulty we faced was the failure of the microphone to record any audio. This added another hour to project because we needed to use audacity to dub our video. We had to record many takes to match our lips in the video, while also trying to minimize the amount of background noise produced by other groups working in lab. Once we had the audio complete, we then had to tediously sync it with the video. I have shared the movie with friends and everyone has liked it so far. It was an incredibly easy project to complete, taking only 3 hours. It would have taken less than 2 if we did not have the audio issue. I definitely could use something like this as a project for my students in the future.

P.S. You can view my project at www.tinyurl.com/jjsproject