Scavenger Hunt

I came into the scavenger hunt with a great deal of knowledge about how to conduct one. I was a camp counselor, so if we needed to keel a couple of hours between activities, we'd send our kids on a treasure hunt much like the one we went on. It took minutes to prepare and hours to complete: it was a camp counselor's dream. Our scavenger hunts looked a lot like this:

I also have a great deal of experience with Microsoft PowerPoint, so Google Presenter was not too far a cry. I noticed several simarities between the two of them. The tool bars are almost the exact same, and they layout is quite similar. Text boxes are created similarly, the fonts are about the same, and on the screen they are almost imperceptivly similar. However, I find that objects in Google Presenter are much, much easier to manipulate. That is such a relief, as I had always wondered why s visual program like PowerPoint made manipulating the visual plane so frustrating.

I have already used Google Presenter in my other classes and plan to use it in the future with my classes. It has the added benefit of being stored on the web, so your "version" of Microsoft does not matter and we never have to worry about emailing out stuff; it is stored on our drive and accessible from any computer.

ActiveInspire Up to this Point

So I spent most of the week sick, lying in bed, vaguely wishing I would slip into a medically-induced coma (can you tell I'm an awful patient?) This means that I missed a class, and that kind f put me behind a bit.

Tuesday in class we started ActiveInspire, and I found it really interesting. I had no real contact with ActiveInspire before, but I really enjoyed learning about it. I do have a lot of experience with powerpoint, which was helpful because the two programs are similar in nature. I had tried to do things like this using powerpoint.  For example, I would try to create filled text boxes and "wipe away" the fill. This was not a horrible way to go about this, but it is also not perfect. Magic revealer is much, much easier. I also tried to do something like pull tabs. Since powerpoint in presenter mode is difficult at best and horrible frustrating at worst .

However, I so far have really enjoyed toying around with ActiveInspire. I found it to be quite interesting and surprisingly easy to use once I got the hang of it. I cannot see myself assigning ActiveInspire activity to my students, because 1) it does take some toying around with because it is a new software, and 2) It would take a long time to get anything done. I can, though, see using it as a study aid. Students would "play" the various games to study better. I might even be able to put it up on the class website and use it as homework.

Picasa and Google Presentation

I have greatly enjoyed digital images. I knew very little about them going in, so it has been helpful for me to figure out how I can better showcase them and use them in the classroom. I used google presenter tool for another class with great effect. I found that since it is stored on the web we don't have the same size issues as when I try to email a PowerPoint. That can be helpful when I assign PowerPoints to students and do not want to fill my inbox with so many larger files. Having them use google presenter can help eliminate that.


I had the hardest time with the Picasa assignment! I could not for the life of me figure out this software. I did not like that I had to save the images to my desktop to upload them, but once they are in my album it seemed ok to delete them. Then I could not figure out how to tag and saving was not clear, so I accidently lost everything once.

Also, I found the free sites we used in class to be unhelpful. They had two or three images I could use on the first 15 pages of each site, and they were all protected by copyright to disallow downloading.

All in all, once I got the hang of it, I really like Picasa.

https://picasaweb.google.com/100170207008782841606/1950sWomen?authkey=Gv1sRgCJe76uflv9KkQw#

1950s Women