Digital Story: Adding Game Promo Video

I created this promotional video for my adding game at Animoto. I think it turned out pretty well. This website was very simple to use; all I had to do was upload pictures and videos. It was a breeze to make short video clips from a longer video using the tools on the website. This site is an interesting tool for creating slideshow-type videos and could potentially be useful in the classroom. However, I'm not sure it is as useful as other resources I have used for this course over the past few weeks.

Screencasting

I used Screencast to create an instructional video about how to play my adding game. I found this program very simple to use. This could be a good resource in the future if I were looking to create an informational video showing my students how to use a particular website or even if I just wanted to record myself explaining a SmartBoard presentation for students to use at home. The only problem with this particular recording is that the volume on the audio is really low. Next time I would use a better microphone for recording audio.

Educational Game: Adding Game

I used Gamemaker 8.1 Lite to create an adding game for kindergarten students. The game includes addition sentences with sums from 1 to 9. It's a very simple game since it was the first game I created. The player has to count up the objects and use the keyboard to type the sum. Also because it's the first game I created, it isn't anything Earth-shattering or as fun as it could be. This game is more of a foundation to build on for a future game to me. It was interesting but also very time-consuming to develop a game. I would like to attempt to make another, more in-depth and fun, game in the future. Here is a link to download my adding game.

Glogster: Summer Safety

As the school year just ended, my kindergarten students and I discussed how to stay safe during the summer. Using Glogster, I created a poster about how kids can stay safe during the summer. Although I didn't do so, it is possible to add videos to your posters on Glogster as well. This could be very helpful as an interactive and eye-catching teaching resource. The only challenges I faced while creating this poster was that the website seems kind of resource-intensive and it made my computer run a little slower than usual. As long as everything is loaded ahead of time, I could see this being an interesting resource in the classroom. Here is a link directly to my Summer Safety Glog.

Smart Notebook Calendar Activity

I have been working on a calendar activity for primary grade students in Smart Notebook. I have utilized a similar activity in my kindergarten class this past year. I believe that creating my own will be useful for meeting my students' needs. I look forward to continuing my development of this Smart Notebook activity in the future and using it in the classroom.



I found the use of tables in Smart Notebook very frustrating and will be avoiding them as much as possible in future pages and activities. They are not as flexible and simple to use as I had expected them to be. When creating the calendar itself, I drew rectangles myself instead of using a table. This fit my purposes much better.

Creeping Creatures Concept Map on Popplet

In my kindergarten class, we have been learning about different kind of bugs (the unit is called Creeping Creatures). Using Popplet, I was able to create a concept map to describe many different characteristics of two creatures that we studied: the Pillbug and the Beetle. I was able to organize these characteristics by similarities and differences with ease. This is a very simple way to create a concept map, web, or Venn Diagram of sorts with students in a more motivating way than writing on a whiteboard or paper. The abilities to insert pictures and change colors of the boxes are nice, simple ways to liven up the concept map. I would like to continue utilizing this resource in the future.

Social Bookmarking: Resources for Developing Kindergarten Number Sense and Counting Skills

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that can be very useful for finding and sharing resources in education. I created a stack of links useful for teaching number sense and counting to kindergarteners. This stack contains online games, printables, songs, and literature connections all useful for teaching counting and number sense to kindergarten students. I have used similar social bookmarking websites before, but this was my first time using Delicious. I thought the ability to group links as stacks relating to a single theme was particularly useful. Because of my familiarity with social bookmarking, I didn't really face any challenges with this assignment.

Social bookmarking could be a great feature for my students in the future. Not only could I use it to find and share resources that could be useful for teaching certain skills and concepts for in-class use, but I could also share these resources with my students' parents for at-home use. I believe the games and songs in particular would be appreciated by the children and parents.

Twitter

A week ago, I created a Twitter account for this course. After taking a look at #edtech and #edchat, I discovered that Twitter can be a goldmine for discovering new, useful resources. The drawback is that because of the outstanding volume of posts on Twitter, it can be overwhelming to try to find something useful. Although there are so many valuable resources posted to Twitter, searching through posts relating to a specific hashtag means wading through a lot of material that is not so useful. Because of this reality, I don't believe I would use Twitter as my primary source of finding new resources and keeping up to date, but it could be useful for me as an additional resource.

Drawing Assignment: The Learning Ladybug

I created the Learning Ladybug as an avatar for a prospective educational game using Inkscape. I chose a ladybug because in my kindergarten class, we have been learning about beetles and ladybugs. I have also used ladybugs in the past for other purposes, such as for an "ug" word family bug. I feel that my students would enjoy this avatar.

In the process of this assignment, I learned a bit about how to use Inkscape. It's clearly a program that has a lot of features but it's quite difficult to just jump in and start using the program. In order to figure out how to create something as simple as a straight line, I had to go to Google. Overall, the program was useful for my simple drawing, but I would find it very challenging to create a more complicated figure in the future due in part to my relative lack of artistic ability and the difficulty of the program.

Introduction

This is my introductory post on my Web Portfolio for my Educational Technology course at Hofstra University. Over the course of the next week or two, I will be posting the products of each of my assignments. I hope that these will all be useful for myself as a new elementary teacher and perhaps they will even be useful as a resource for others. Without further ado, let's get started.