Video Project

I had so much fun making this video. I've used iMovie before, so I was pretty comfortable doing this project. I think that using homemade videos as a classroom tool opens up lots of doors for educating students. The teacher can put together a slide show of Paris and students can take a trip to France without ever leaving the classroom. The possibilities are endless...

Honduras

Interactive Spreadsheet

This was a new skill for me. I've used Excel before for lots of projects, but I never needed to make an interactive worksheet. I learned some things about the program that I didn't know anything about. I think I could use this one day in my classroom for quizzes about musical terms or composers.

Inspiration Project

I enjoyed completing the Inspiration project. For me, it would be useful in a music class with younger kids. I like that you can change the colors and make it coordinated for better organization of thoughts. It was a very easy program to do, and was self-explanatory. Usually with software it's hard to find buttons to do certain things, but with this program I liked how easy it was to find everything.

Romantic Composers

Digital Scavenger Hunts and Such

I enjoyed doing this digital scavenger hunt project, and I think I will definitely use it in my classroom one day. It's a great way for students to learn about technology, learn about a specific subject, and have fun all at the same time. As technologically inept as I am, it was very easy to figure out how to make a slide show presentation on google docs and how to post it onto my blog, so I think my future students will have no trouble when they complete this assignment.

Music Scavenger Hunt

Picasa Album

Google Docs

I had no idea that Google was capable of doing documents. Before this class, I thought Google was only a search engine. It's interesting to know that I can do group work over the Internet without ever trying to schedule a meeting outside of class. I also like that I can set up my own home page on iGoogle and customize it to show the things that I'm interested in knowing. Things like weather, stupid quotes, and current events are things that you can put on your page. And since I like fish so much, it's cool that you can customize your page to look like a reef. Anyways, with all this rambling, maybe I'll use Google docs and such outside of this class to get projects done.

Webquests in My Classroom

So, the question is, would or would I not use webquests in my future classroom? The answer is, I am undecided. I am still not convinced at how useful they actually are, but I can see a small benefit of getting students more comfortable with the WWW. Thinking about my future classroom, though, the odds of one of my students not knowing how to use the internet is probably very small. Even if students don't have internet access at home, surely they go to their friends' houses or even to the school library. I think it's safe to say we are entering into this techonology era where every kid will know how to use a computer. They already walk around with iPods and iPads and who knows what else, so what's to say that they can't use a computer. So, I think that while webquests may help students learn to get around on the internet, I can't say for certain if I would want to use them in my classroom. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what the situation is when I get into teaching.

Wiki Work

Now I can officially say that I know how to make a wiki. How much will I actually be able to use one?...I have no idea. But at least I am somewhat proficient in them now. Although, in one of my other education classes, we are doing a group project. We met in our groups yesterday and one girl suggested that we could make a wiki to keep in touch and exhange information since we're all in different majors and are busy. Hypothetically, if that wiki lecture had been next week or something, I would have no idea what that girl was talking about-and since everyone else did, that could have been embarassing. I'm one step closer in becoming savvy with technology.

So the first assignment we did was evaluating websites. We got to choose a website and go down a detailed list, making sure it had accurate information and wasn't biased in any way. I chose a music theory resource website and found that it had a lot of great resources for teaching young kids the fundamentals of music theory. The site had a lot of games for the students to play and ways for teachers to assess their knowledge of skills through the games.
I thought this assignment was kind of easy and that anyone could have faked their way through it, but that if you actually took the time to look closely, you were able to learn a lot about how to recognize bad resources on the web.

The website I looked at : http://www.emusictheory.com/

486 Welcome

Welcome! This is my blog about my journey through my 486 class at the University of Tennessee. I'll post comments on the projects we work on and what I learn from each activity. Technology and I are not close friends, so I hope to learn some more this semester about using computers.