How often do you go on trips, and you wish that you could share your experiences with more than just a ton of photo uploads onto Facebook or Flickr? As an educator, you may not always have an entire computer readily available to create new projects, especially since the creative bug rarely hits us at convenient times. Lucky for us, creativity and learning projects are possible on the go through our iPods, iPads, phones, etc: NO COMPUTER REQUIRED!!! Since I plan on teaching at the Middle School or High School level, I know that there will rarely be a student in my class that doesn’t have one of these devices, since they are the “popular” thing to have these days, I can teach my students how to use their mobile technology to accomplish new, unique and exciting projects that appeal to their need to be mobile and “hip”. I learned many useful tips and ideas from the video Project Based Learning in Hand” by Tony Vincent of Phoenix, AZ (http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=645).

My screencast took me a little while to come up with an idea, but once I figured that out it was pretty simple to do. My screencast is about the app “Nike+”, which is $1.99 through iTunes. The app helps you log how much running you are doing, how fast you are running, provides different challenges and training guides to help you schedule out and prepare to run anywhere from the “walk to run” stage to the full marathon stage. It also has a feature to play a power song or two when you are just not feeling very motivated during your work-out.

Link: http://www.screenr.com/MaP

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A Pecha Kucha presentation is a type of power-point that avoids the “death by power point” syndrome that is sweeping across business offices and classrooms all over the world. Death by power-point is a pandemic, and Pecha Kucha is a cure! A good PK is one that is informative, has great (not good) pictures, holds the audience’s attention and one that is not repetitive. Anybody can make 20 slides, throw some clip-art onto the page, add some special effects and read off bullet points. It takes skill to find an amazing, awe-inspiring image that has a Creative Commons license and speak from note-cards or memory rather than just using the power point as a “cheat sheet”. You have to know what you are talking about and be able to look at your audience as you speak. What did people do before power-point? That’s right, they STUDIED THEIR MATERIAL and MEMORIZED IT!!!

The skills I learned from doing my Pecha Kucha were how to distinguish between a good image and a great image, how to choose images that would capture my audience’s attention, how to time myself so that I do not spend too much time on one slide and too little time on another. Pecha Kucha projects are also great to practice using the Socratic teaching method, so that you can get feedback from your audience and let things develop in their own time, rather than just typing out facts for your audience to copy down and memorize. Pecha Kucha projects give the presenter (or educator) more creative freedom than a traditional Power-Point presentation would, which allows the audience (or students) to have a more beneficial and hands-on learning experience.

I plan on teaching Middle School English Education. I could definitely see myself using Pecha Kucha presentations to help my students delve more deeply into whatever type of literature we are studying, as well as teaching research methods and models for different types of literary criticism and analysis.

My final project is complete and is amazing! OK, it’s weird, not amazing. Here’s the link!

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/acox23/1650732

It was difficult to do, especially with traveling and such in between classes. Somehow I got it done though!

My idea for my Scratch project is to do an interactive band. My Petch Kutcha presentation was about music, and I really enjoy music. I also have new images to work with since I went to a concert just this past Tuesday, March 8th. I would, of course, incorporate dinosaur sprites because dinosaurs are awesome and definitely know how to rock! There is already a stage background, now I just have to figure out what I want my sprites to actually do. The possibilities are endless!