Apr
Have you ever sat through a powerpoint presentation and felt that it would never end or that you fell asleep and woke up just in time for the ending? Or have you had to make a powerpoint presentation and wonder if it would be interesting enough for your audience? Well, here is a new way to present your information to others and it is called Prezi. Prezi is a Web App tool for presentations. You can “create astonishing presentations live and on the web. It allows you to organize your ideas, zoom in to show details and zoom out to show the big picture of your topic. You can check out their website at http://prezi.com/. Here’s an example of a Prezi presentation:
One of the classes that I took, I learned how to develop an interactive game using powerpoint. If you plan it out well, it is simple to develop a game for students to practice a particular skill or to review a concept. I found a website where you can find the steps on how to develop an interactive powerpoint game and some examples, Instructional Technology Resources and W Wild Team . It basically says that first you need to consider you target audience and choose a project that is appropriate for the level of your audience. Since I teach kindergarten, I obviously would not choose a Jeopardy type game for them, I would design a simpler project and focus on the skill that they are practicing. Once you have established the audience, the level, the objective of the game, then it’s time to make a flowchart to diagram how students will navigate through their answers. A great website for designing your flowchart is www.flowchart.com .
After flowcharting, then you need to consider how your project is going to look like. This is where storyboarding comes in. Here is an example of storyboarding: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/starttofinish/storyboarding/. The site walks you through from beginning to the final project.
Once you’re ready to use PowerPoint or Keynote, the cool thing that I learned about this program, is that if you choose a text box or a picture to be clicked on in order to navigate somewhere else, you would control click (for Apple) or right click (for PC) and choose action settings and choose hyperlink to the slide you want it to go to.
The exciting part of this whole project is that we can take these ideas and use them for our needs in the Dual Language classroom. At first, it will be a lot of work, which we are no strangers to that, but in the long run we can also have some cool technology games for our students as well. Here’s an example of a game that I made for my dual kinder class, Bono el mono.
Ever make a video, whether it be personal or for school use, that you felt it was good enough to share with others? Well, this tutorial will show you how easy you can upload your video onto YouTube and share it with others or embed it on your website. This is a great way for teachers to share what they have made with others. Why reinvent the wheel if there are resources that we can share with each other. So here’s the tutorial on “How to Upload your Video onto YouTube”. Hope it is helpful.
Mar
How many times have you seen a cool video on Youtube that you could use in your classroom for a lesson? Most likely, if your school district is like mine, Youtube is blocked. So how can you show that awesome video to your class? You can pwn that video at home, put it on a flash drive and show it at school. What is pwn? It’s a way you can download a Youtube video without it being linked to the website. Here’s a tutorial on how you can pwn a video:
Here’s a tutorial on how to embed a video on your website.
Jan
¡Hola! My name is María Arce and I’m a Dual Language Kindergarten teacher. Most of my instruction in the classroom is in Spanish. As do so many Dual Language teachers, I am constantly looking for and/or making my own teaching materials because the teacher resources are limited in Spanish. Even if a publisher offers their program in spanish, whether it be language arts or math, when it comes to technology resources, when they are asked if they have it in spanish, the answer is no. I decided to go back to school and pursue my Masters degree in Educational Technology and Learning. I wanted to learn more about technology, what’s out on the web and how I can apply it to spanish and use it in my classroom.
