iMovie

In class, we made a movie using iMovie. I made mine on the different types of leaves. To begin, I collected pictures of leaves from the public domain. Making the movie was actually pretty fun. I enjoyed learning how to use the software. We added titles, captions, music and credits to our movie. Everything seemed to go well. The only difficulty I had was occasionally struggling to make the caption stay up for the same amount of time as the picture. Other than that everything was pretty easy to use and figure out. I definitely liked that you could just drag the pictures into iMovie! I definitely think making movies for my future classroom would be a fun was to take students on virtual field trips or teach them small lessons. Next time I would like to be able to have my own pictures instead of having to find them on the public domain.

Storybird

I created my own story on Storybird!

I think this would be a very cool tool to use in my future classroom! I enjoyed making this story. Older kids would be able to create their own because the site is easy to use. Younger kids could make a story with the help of an adult, or I could simply make my own stories to share with a future classroom. Overall using this tool went well! The only struggle was the difficulty finding pictures I wanted to use. At one point I has lost a picture that I had wanted to use and it took quite a while to find it again. Next time, the only thing I would do differently is allow myself more time to create a creative story!

Animoto- in class presentation

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Inspiration 9- Digital Diagrams

In class, we created digital diagrams pertaining to the Tennessee State Standards. I created mine based on the 5th grade Science standard 0507.5.1- Classify animals according to their physical characteristics. Creating this diagram was actually pretty fun! I enjoyed it and definitely think creating similar diagrams in my future classroom will be extremely helpful. For the most part, everything went well since I enjoyed doing this assignment. The most difficult part was actually finding the standard and matching the information on my diagram with the information in the textbook. Inspiration was a really helpful tool, and I hope to use it more in the future.

Interactive Spreadsheet- parts of speech

Making this spreadsheet was quite time consuming! I am pleased with the finished product, but there were some stressful moments while creating it. For example, although the computer in our classroom is a Mac and my laptop is a Mac as well, the instructions did not match up with the version of Excel I used on my laptop. Some of the wording was different, making it difficult to find some of the specific tabs, etc. Overall, I thought this was a really neat activity. It is really interesting how much you can do with a spreadsheet- I never knew you could use logic statements the way we did! Although making assignments with this tool is time consuming, I think it is very useful. I plan on using this again in my classroom to create quizzes and practice that give immediate feedback.

Interactive Spreadsheet- compound words

Resource Wiki

This is a picture of the front page of the Elementary Ed Resource Wiki.

This wiki will be very helpful for the class. As future teachers, it will be extremely important to know of websites with useful tips, information, lesson plans, and games. I look forward to being able to use this resource wiki in the future when looking for ideas to use in my classroom.