Cedu 533 Week 2

This week clearly went better then the previous week with regards to the personal homework that is due at the beginning of week 3. It just made more sense this week than last and although it's still challenging and time consuming, it took less time than last week. Secondly, there was something Prof. Sklar said in last weeks class when talking about the midterm exam and the class in general. He mentioned that people we getting better at this then in previous years. He credited "web 2" for that increase saying that people were simply more familiar with basic concepts and could relate to HTML better by having been exposed to Wikis and the like. I agree that that is personally the case for me as the connection I make in my naggen to make sense of HTML is brought about more redilly because of my experiences with WIKIs etc.

DECU 533

The idea of HTML programming antimidated me at first, to be quite honest. However once I got going I realized that it's just like any skill. . . with a little practice you can get the hang it pretty quickly. Really it's just a matter of spending the time necessary for the accurate programing. In some ways I made the connection to carpentry or pottery. . . when you see the finished product you end up with that sense that you've built something. The one exception I had was the insertion of a graphic onto the web site. That was far more difficult then I pictured and I never mastered it. When I was successful the picture was far too large and I was never successful at resizing it.
The biggest problem that I had, oddly enough, wasn't with the editing but the FireFTP. At the beginning I just never got any rythym with using it. I would place the index.htm in odd places and loose track of it continually. It was in my study team where I learned the trick of centralizing everything in a desktop folder. Only from that point afterward did everything flow.

Cedu 531 Week 5

As I look back and reflect on the information gleened from the class I can't help but to think that this is the wave of the future of teaching. I predict in 20 years the use of these types of projects will be used commonly in most classrooms. The idea is that these products allow students to take ownership of their learning.

That said, the specific project I have in mind that uses digital story telling is an extension of something I do called student of the week. This is a classroom and personal self esteem building activity in which one student has a special week that they are assigned to throughout the year. During that week they present information about themselves to the class. I've always had the template for the presentation on a poster. The poster requires some drawing or photographs of personal things that show information about the student. Why not have this format be a digital tale? Several applications such as photostory, imovie or voicethread could be utilized? The presentation would be far more engaging and much more individualized and could still include traditional presentations when appropriate.