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   

Wikis out there for Social Studies

I did look up Wikis specifically for the deaf, but I really only found a couple designed to help people understand deaf culture. I loved them, and maybe could use them in my classroom to help students new to the school or late deafened and therefore new to Deaf culture. They could also be helpful for parents trying to help their newly diagnosed child integrate into Deaf culture. But while these are useful, they are not exactly what I was looking for.

I was really looking for were Wikis about social studies content. I was so glad to find so many. With deaf students, it is better to have more visual information than less, and to be honest the more captioned videos something has the more my students are engaged. I found that the following things were most important to a good WebQuests for deaf student:

1. Working links
2. Pictures (preferably original ones) that are labeled
3. Not a lot of weird moving grahics that distract from the text
4. Directions that are clearly labeled as directions and are very concise
5. Videos with closed captioning or English subtitles

I looked at the following wiki: http://constitutionresources.pbworks.com/w/page/16391949/FrontPage about the US constitution. It was helpful, and all the data was recent (history only changes so much). It's really more of a teacher resource, with more lesson plans than just activities. I saw no student work, it seemed to only be for teachers. However, it was super useful.

Inquiry Based Project

 Actually creating an inquiry-based activity was quite valuable for me. Honestly, I thought I would be able to quickly throw this together. I found instead that answers to questions were decentralized and I had a difficult time finding them from reliable sources. I found myself frustrated, and I can only imagine the frustration my students would have felt.

I had just kind of come up with questions, questions I know the answer to because I'm a college senior, but then when I had to actually FIND these answers, I ended up revising questions because they were way too difficult to find outside a text book. This is actually something I view as a weakness of Web-based activities: textbooks are boring, but they offer a lot of information in a small space. This is something the web rarely offers, because information on the web for an 8th grade audience is decentralized, while textbook grade information is outside the ZPD of most middle schoolers. And so teacher have to balance it all out all of the time.

But it does give me a good lesson in creating activities: I should always do the activity first and be able to do it well. To skip this step puts into jepoardy my entire activity.

Webquests

I had always thought WebQuests were a bit too time consuming for use in a real classroom, but I am pretty sure I only thought that because the WebQuests I did in high school were awful. There was no teamwork and the teachers always allotted way too much time for them. Usually the activity would take me ten minutes then I would have to sit there for another 40 minutes waiting for class to be over. 

However, the WebQuests we looked at in class were really neat! Especially in the context of history, the internet has so much potential to show primary sources, video, and pictures I can't give them with just a book. And I love the team collaboration involved with WebQuests. 

Website Evaluation

I found assessing a website an interesting activity. I especially found the sections on which types of software or plugins important; I had not previously thought about checking for those types of things. In middle school, I actually had to do a similar activity, and I learned a couple of good lessons from doing the same activity something like ten years apart.

The first lesson was the difference in the types of activities and instruction needed at the middle school and college level. In middle school, the teacher allowed us to review any website we wanted and it totally overwhelmed me. I remember thinking about how the web was far too large to just ask me to review ANY site. How could any person every pick! And at that point my house still had cable internet, so the whole thing took forever. I do not remember the website I picked, but the whole thing made me feel panicky. Now, you ask me to review any website and I am comfortable enough on the web to find and pick one. I would imagine most of my students are much more comfortable on the internet than I was at that point, with social networking being such an important part of their lives. However, I would still refrain from just setting them loose on the web. It is fine for college kids, but middle grades children need a bit more structure, I think. Perhaps I could ask them (if I ever needed to assign this) to review a website about spies during the Cold War or something of that nature.

I was also by just how different the web is now than ten year ago. I've been present for its evolution, but stopping and thinking about it really took me aback. For example, we did not review plugins because at that point java was really the only embedded plugin. The only navigation we cared about was being able to return to the home page, as many websites did not have side bar or top navigation. It was really more like a word file than a webpage by today's standards. Technology is really quite remarkable.