Technology and Literacy Reflections

Grayson's Revised Website This project came at a great time, because I was recently asked to present at a Google Conference hosted at my school next month. I had to include a link to my resource page or website, and it was a required field on the form I was completing. I created this site for a different class, but realized it was the one that I could continue to use from a professional standpoint because it hosts a lot of my free online resources that I've created over the duration of my program. I updated the site by captioning each tool and providing a link to the free resource. As I develop my resources for my upcoming presentation on using Google Hangouts in the classroom, I will add a new tab and direct the audience there. I'd love feedback in terms of if it's set up in a user friendly manner because I'd love for it to be a resource for the people I present to next month.

This was my first time using Animoto and I am really excited about the end result. I was really impressed with how easy it was to use and I've already got a million ideas of how to use it in my classroom this week. For example, I'd like to have my freshmen create their vision board using Animoto and I'm considering having my juniors create advertisements for different historical colonies. I made this particular Animoto as a "get to know you" that I could share with my students as a way to introduce myself and share some fun facts about myself.

This video is an informative digital story that teaches high school students to write a persuasive essay for their history class. The video walks students through both the steps of creating an essay and a specific example (the American Revolution). In response to feedback I received, I would liked to clarify that I don't envision this video replacing classroom instruction, but instead I see it as a way to support students when they are outside of class and need a refresher course. I used a new-to-me free video editing program called Da Vinci Resolve to create this video and then I uploaded the final product to YouTube. I recorded 29 separate voice segments and used Creative Commons to search for images that matched with my voice-overs. Then I uploaded each of these in order, finally adding a soundtrack at the end. The last step was to add transitions between the images. I had planned to use WeVideo, another free tool that I am more familiar with, however the downside to WeVideo ...