WK1 Blog Entry: Publish or Present, Please Choose!

I am having a difficult time deciding if I should publish or present my leadership project. I have gone back and forth for awhile now and have not fully committed to either. To tell the truth, I would love to be published since I have not accomplished this goal as yet. Also, I love presenting, but have not presented at any big conferences. Both of these choices would push me and help me to accomplish a great life goal. So I considered all that is going on with me right now and feel that I should  start with the presentation and work on being published as my next step. This is my plan today, I still have a few days before I have to commit to one or the other, so who know what the final outcome will be. :)

BP8

Hello friends, please follow this link to see my comment about Avairy and Podbean. My friend Bill did a great job teaching about these Web 2.0 tools.

BP7

Hey everyone! Follow this link to read my comment and learn about Posterous.

RILS_Publication

This is a new and exciting way for students to introduce themselves and to share who they are and what they are learning.

Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario

Cheryl Jones-Gage

Overview

This scenario is relevant and innovative for learners and gives them the opportunity to introduce themselves in a new and exciting way. Using Schoology, a new web 2.0 tool, in an online learning environment, the students will create a video using iMovie and share it with the church congregation.

Target Audience – My target audience is a group of 14-16 year old students in a church leadership program called Corps Cadets.

Materials

·      Computers

·      Internet access

·      Video Camera

·      Pictures

Objectives

Students will be able to create a group video after sharing ideas and collaborating on Schoology. The students will share the video online and in church.

Procedure

·      Join Schoology and set up a personal profile.

·      Start a group and send out invitations and access codes to students who are in the group.

·      Set up assignments, homework, or quizzes for the group.

·      Post video assignment that students must view and comment on.

·      After viewing the video, students must post ideas on creating a video of their own.

·      In next class, students use video camera to record group videos and take pictures.

·      Students will review pictures and video clips to decide what to use in creating movie. They will also choose background music.

·      Students with the help of the teacher will use iMovie to create a movie from their video clips and background music.

Web 2.0 Tools – Schoology, Wordle and Prezi

Schoology- is a free web-based Learning Management System and configurable social network. Schoology allows instructors and students to easily create, share, and manage academic material through a social networking interface.

www.schoology.com

Wordle- is a free web tool that helps you create exciting word clouds. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friend.

Prezi- Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them. The result: visually captivating presentations that lead your audience down a path of discovery.

Social Participation

The students will work together in an online learning environment (Schoology) to share ideas and brainstorm.  Then students will meet together and take pictures, interview each other, take video and whatever other ideas the group wants to use to create the movie. Next, students will start putting pictures and clips together in iMovie.

Making Connections

a)     Previous knowledge – the students will watch a short video on the Schoology site that was created in iMovie. They will listen for music, sound effects, and other parts of the movie. They will brainstorm ideas to create their own movies using the viewed movie as a model.

b)    Something that is relevant for them – this group has changed a lot over the summer. Former members have moved away and new members have joined this leadership-training program called Corps Cadets. The students have a special Sunday when the group will be introduced to the church and share in the leadership of the program. They will use this opportunity to introduce themselves on video using iMovie.

c)     Local audience – the video will be shown to the local church congregation.

Create / Produce

The product that will be created is video using iMovie.

Assessment

Reflection

a.     The learner will reflect on this experience by posting comments on Schoology. They will debrief the experience and use the knowledge learned to brainstorm more ideas for another movie.

b.     The teacher will reflect by read all comments posted on Schoology and give feedback to the students on how the project went.

PE5_Schoology

Schoology is great! Several of the students have completed the first assignment. They signed up for Schoology and watched the video and posted comments. I did not get a lot of ideas from them on what they wanted to add to their movie. So in class, we watched the video together and started brainstorming ideas.

They were interested in learning about some other web 2.0 tools, so I introduced them to Prezi and Wordle.
They started to play around with these tools and created a Wordle with all of their names in it. The majority of their time was spent on Prezi. They also used all of their names and a short description of what a Corps Cadet is. They wanted this to be the major part of their video because they thought it was very unique and they had not seen it before. They also felt that their audience would respond positively to it as well.

Next, we started video taping the group while working on Prezi, and introducing themselves. In the next class we continued taping and began editing. We plan to post the finished product on Schoology and post comments.

PE4_Schoology

For my RILS I have chosen to use a program called Schoology. It was very easy to find videos on YouTube and on the Schoology site to see how the program works. I think it is a wonderful tool, but I am having a lot of difficulty using it so far. I plan to keep working on it until I figure it out because there have been so many rave reviews of this program. I will consider my problems to be growing pains with the anticipation of great joy at the end!
So far, I have set up my profile and started a group. I have sent out emails inviting others to join this group, and I have also created one assignments.

I am now waiting for the students to join. The first assignment is to watch a video that I have posted and them comment on it. Next, the students have to share ideas on what they can do to create their own video to show on Corps Cadet Sunday. Tomorrow in class we will start video taping members of the group introducing themselves and capturing pictures of the group to add to the video.

BP6

Hey everyone, my friend Bill is a real tech expert! Follow this link to find out about a great web2.0 tool that Bill shared called DivShare.