Module 5

I survived!!!!

It might just be me - but this was a challenging module...

Twenty hours for the course?! I think Glogster and Prezi took nearly that amount - each....

BUT!!!

I really did like it (eventually....) and learned so much - like real life seminars with real people can make life so much easier.... Okay, but.... 

Seriously...

I can't wait to have a go at introducing these forms of media and expression to my class - but I would have a few more practice goes at home first. My sons were quite in awe of Prezi and couldn't wait to give that a go. They are Power Point junkies...There are so many little bits of assumed information that is omitted from all the You Tube type tutorials and Webinars that I went searching desperately. I felt I was always 90% there, but never got the last piece of information to get me over the line easily. That did become frustrating. 

So here comes my blow by blow account and evidence of what I have spent MANY days doing!!!

Bubbl.us for brainstorming.

Vibrant and bright and colourful. Would be great to have up on an interactive board to record the results of a brainstorm and encourage children to add thoughts and ideas. As I teach primary, I suspect I would use this more in a teacher directed situation. For children - well the ones I currently teach, I suspect that good old butcher's paper and colourful Texas would yield the same results - only much more quickly...  But it was fun, engaging and actually quite easy - once I worked out the You Tube clip talking about siblings, cousins, direct descendants and loved ones.... Mind Map meets Family Tree....

Now let's see how we go about inserting it in to this blog.

Okay. That was simple. For a change. Wasn't at all sure how to add that to my blog and it was easy!!! So, for your viewing pleasure, here is an easy to create Bubbl.us (I just can't get the image of footballers 'bubbling' out of my mind at the moment - but that is my problem.) 

Glogster - for great posters

This was a HUGE learning curve. I decided to create a Glogster on Explanation texts as we are about to start them in Year 4. I loved the result, but this took a lot of searching for information before I could get anywhere. Perhaps I was trying to create too much too soon and should have kept it simpler to start with. It took days to complete this task. Again, I think the writers of tutorials assume too much background knowledge.

 It took many searches to finally work out that PDF's had to be converted to jpegs to insert (unless you wanted a paper clip in the back ground - I have Year 4 so I wanted it ALL on screen visually).

I hated the tiny pictures on my poster as they couldn't be seen, so I changed all my recently converted tiny jpegs into huge files on Photo Shop. At this point, I also didn't know that those tiny pictures blew up quite large when you held a mouse over them. See what I mean about too many assumptions? Assume we all know nothing would be a good place to start. I thought I was dead clever blowing everything up. Out smarted that lot I thought... Only the files were too big to be uploaded. So I had to convert them all back again...

I worked through all of that and had a dummy go at inserting it into my Blog. That was another couple of hours. I followed all the instructions from You Tube and many other sources. My screen kept filling with lovely, huge long codes of letters and numbers... I wanted my Glogster, not numbers. My husband sent me away while he promised to resolve the issue. About two hours later  was solved... WHY DIDN'T ONE WEB SITE MENTION THAT TO SEE YOUR GLOGSTER YOU NEEDED TO VIEW IT ON THE WEB AND NOT IN DRAFT!!!!! Getting my drift about only 90% of the information!?

Anyway, here is my Glogster... I know I will view it as no more than a HTML code (wow, that makes me sound like I know what I'm talking about) but if anyone else in the world happens to read all this work, then you will see it as an interactive Glog. Click on the things that say click. It is quite fun actually!  Is anyone else really reading this or am I just talking to myself?! 

This Glogster is way too big, but I am having technical issues. It wasn't that big when I did my practice go...It is either this, or only half a Glog in my Blog.... It also wasn't this big when I was looking at in on the Glogster site. If it was then I would never have bothered trying to blow all the little jpegs up!

Prezi - Power Point is seriously left behind.

I should have used the pre-made templates earlier. I didn't realise I could add extra frames to what I wanted. I finally worked out how to change my back ground, change fade ins and re-size etc. It wasn't too bad and I think it does leave Power Point sadly languishing. Although it took me a while as a newbie, I think after a few goes it is definitely something that both the class and myself would use. I would love to try adding voice overs to the content too. What's a few more hours...

I did start this off several times, so this is probably version 365. This particular version was started off on the iPad and was completed on my PC, so the fact that it is multi - platform is really handy. You Tube content was easily added, although I had originally tried to upload clips from ABC Splash. This didn't work, nor did trying to change the files to FLV's (as suggested by Prezi). Both my sons want to learn how to use this, so it is clearly appealing to children.

In the classroom, I would suggest the template to use etc, so as to avoid wasting too much time, but as with Glogster, I think it would be very engaging for children to use and certainly would encourage them to explore their ideas more fully and visually. They are fun programmes. We just need to be mindful that not too much time is spent playing around with things and trying to problem solve. That is where I came unstuck.