I really enjoyed watching this video by Tony Vincent. I think he has some great ideas about how technology can be incorporated into a positive learning environment. I liked when he talked about project base learning, and how it allows students to immerse in a topic. I also liked when he talked about when creating a project starting off with the driving question which allows students to voice and choice. While watching this vid I got some great ideas about how to plan an activity and how a simple project can be enough to spark and interest in someone over the topic. I also found it really exciting that he covered ways handhelds can play a big role in recovering info, it was really interesting how they did the live voice interview on their phone. This was very insightful and gave me some great ideas as well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29752392@N07/4510597185/sizes/m/in/photostream/

This week I came to the realization that screener is AWESOME! I never realized just how easy and fun it was to make a screen cast using screener. I used screener to illustrate how to create a simple pie graph in Microsoft Excel to show the difference between eighty and twenty percent. I had a lot of fun creating my screen cast and while working with it longer I became more familiar with it, and how I could make things more interesting. Screencasts can be used for so many different educational purposes, for every subject, and is a great way to give both a visual and verbal explanation that will allow people to pause and go back whenever needed. I will definately be using screener when I am a teacher to demonstrate activities to my students and to enable them to make demonstrations for one another.

The embed code for my screener screen cast is as follows <iframe src=”http://www.screenr.com/embed/yDe” width=”650″ height=”396″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>

This past semester I have learned that a pecha kucha presentation is a slide show that is comprised of only pictures. The pictures however go along with the topic whatever it may be that you choose to talk about. In total there will be twenty slides with a brief discussion over the picture in each slide for twenty seconds. I have really enjoyed working on this assignment, and getting to learn all about my classmates through their pechas kuchas as well. In my opinion what separates a great pecha kucha from one that is just ok, is the amount of enthusiasm, time, and effort put into the project. It is always more interesting and entertaining to watch a pecha kucha that has great pictures, an enthusiastic speaker and a well put together project.

As a result of doing my pecha kucha assignment I have learned how to present powerpoints without reading from the screen. This has given me a lot more confidence in strongly knowing the information that I am going to be presenting and being more well rounded in the topic in general. I have also learned about knowing how to use pictures appropriately and knowing what I have to do to give the correct credit to the pictures I use. I have learned a lot more about creative commons liscences, and have gained much clarity in knowing it is safe to use other pictures from the internet that are not mine, and even clips of media as long as I follow the guidelines of appropriate usage.

Pecha Kucha presentations could be very useful in gradelevel classes, even in the classes I am planning to teach in college and highschool. They enable students to be completely creative and to delve into things that are important to them, and what they are interested in. Even if the presentation had to be over a specific topic they could use creativity in choosing how they wanted to present the information and they would get to choose pictures in which they think best represent what they are going to be discussing. I plan on eventually teaching spanish in highschool and eventually college, pecha kucha presentations could be used in visualizing cultural aspects of different cultural histories.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/electricporcupine/5502932269/sizes/m/in/photostream/

For my final Scratch project, I decided not to focus so much on the length of the project but on working with things that are have been complex for me throughout this process. One of the things I was having trouble with was timing. It has been difficult to achieve spot on timing for the characters in my Scratch projects so I worked closely with accurate timing so that everything looked sharper. Another issue I was having was with motion, I just recently figured out how to make things go slower and faster by utilizing the glide option. Since the characters I used in my final scratch project were butterflies, I wanted to make sure and utilize color to make them appear more lifelike. I worked closely with all of these elements to try to improve my creativity and make my projects more fun and interesting to watch.

 For my final Scratch Project I decided to do just an ordinary day in the life of a happy butterfly, when all of the sudden one of his friends tells him to watch out, then comes a giant net that snatches away the butterfly. I thought this was cute because it symbolizes the point of view of the butterfly rather than that of the child who is about to catch him. I also got to focus on timing and movements of the sprites. It definitely wasn’t a long project but it took a lot of time to pull together and work with all the different elements. I have definately enjoyed working with scratch and learning new ways that it can be utilized for both education and recreation.

                  I had a lot of fun making this scratch project; however it was very time consuming. I decided to make my setting in a sort of park picnic background. The sun is who is narrating the story, and a squirrel and bird are the other two characters. Basically while the sun is telling the story you can see it unfold. The squirrel sees that some people have left some food on a picnic table so he wants to take some; meanwhile a bird is flying by and sees what he is plotting. So the bird saves the food from the squirrel. It sound pretty simple but took forever to get everything timed correctly and to get everything to move to the exact places. I also added in sound to make it a little more fun. I learned a lot about working with the codes and shortcuts that allow me to shorten my scripts. At first my scripts were extremely long, but after working with scratch I was able to reduce them by about half.  I also found myself learning little tricks that made writing script much easier. Scratch is a great way to be creative and work on your skills as an educator as well. I really enjoyed playing around with my scratch project and seeing what all I could create.