The Final Chapter.....For Now

This post marks the final blog post I will be making in our ICT class in the education program at Brandon University.

This class has been great and I found it extremely beneficial and have been able to take a lot of useful applications out of it and hopefully incorporate them into my own classroom.

We spent most of the last week watching other groups video projects and final projects. Obviously, ours was the best but I will let you be the judge of that!

Also, as promised last week here is a link to my e-portfolio.

www.stevenkaskiw.weebly.com.

Hope you have enjoyed my blog thus far!

See ya sooner than later

Week 7, The End is Near

Well this marks the end of another week in our awesome ICT class.

Week 7 was a short one in ICT with us having Monday off thanks to Louis Riel Day. On Tuesday we started our movie project. I was grouped with Bryce, Sam, Carly, and Nicole. After much deliberation we came to the conclusion to make our movie about day dreaming in class. After many shots and some great editing by Sam I think it turned out really well. Everything was shot with Sams's Iphone 5 (held horizontally for better picture), and she used IMovie to edit it.

We intend to put a directors cut version on Youtube once the original airs in class.

I also started to work on my eportfolio this week. I chose to use www.weebly.com to create it because after using it for my website, I found that it came a lot easier the second time around and it still looks sharp and professional. I also like how that you can literally look at it whenever, wherever as long as you have internet access.

I will post the finished products of both the video and eportfolio in posts to come!

See ya next week!

Week 6 Come and Gone

Well this marks the end of another week in ICT class.

We mostly covered digital story telling this week with Mike showing us different programs that we could use. I used photostory for mine because this was the first one he showed me but others used a program call animoto. Had I payed attention just a little longer I would have used animoto as well. The effects in animoto were so much better than photostory's and after asking a couple of my friends they said it seemed just as easy. Photostory was good because you were able to pick your own music for each of your pictures but the music wasn't so great and overall animoto was just more flashy and entertaining.

We then created a google docs where we brought in a picture and edited using a program of our choice.  I chose www.pixlr.com just because it is the one that I am the most familiar with and I find it easy to use.

We then went over our video project and formed groups. I am really looking forward to this project as it seems like a lot of fun!

Below is a link to a video I made using Animoto. Enjoy!

Friends and Family

ICT Education, Week 5

Well we just finished week 5 so we are over half done our term!

Week 5 went good as we covered lots of different topics and different programs.

We looked at bookmark organizers like diigo and pearltree. Pearltree isthe one that I would prefere to use. It looked more user friendly to me. On Tuesday Mike showed us his prezi's presentation. I thought that was really neat and interesting. When making my next presentation I intend to use a prezi because I found that a lot more entertaining then a regular powerpoint presentation so I am assuming my future students would appreciate it more as well! We also talked about a great program called audacity for finding creative commons music that we can add to our presentations. This is great because music makes a presentation that much more intereseting.

We also looked at the SMARTboard. We talked about;

·         Calibration
·         SMART Ink
·         Shapes on screen; rotation, size, copies (ctrl + D)
·         Using markers.
·         Useful for presentations.
·         Word recognition.

Mike also showed us this little guy doing some sweet trick shots!

Ravens win the Superbowl and Week 4 is finished!

Well the Baltimore Ravens won the Superbowl and we wrapped up week 4.

Week 4 was a pretty full week, we covered a lot of things and I published my website. I think the most interesting part of the week was when John Fitch (not the mma fighter) came in and spoke to us about why using technology in the classroom is so important. I thought he raised some good points and feel that we cannot hide from technology. It is always going to be here and is only going to be more efficient and productive for us as teachers and society. As Kate said in her ning post, we as teachers must bring in just the right amount of technology to satisfy our students needs.

Later in the week we worked on our first wiki page. My group did a page on ICT resources in the classroom. We posted videos on how to use technology in the classroom, along with links on how to incorporate technology throughout the curriculum for math, ELA, science and social studies classes. I was the main guy working on it and was able to embed pictures and videos right on to the wiki page.

As mentioned earlier I published my website last friday. The link to it is www.mrkaskiwsclass.weebly.com

Please feel free to let me know what you think of it.

As well since everybody else is posting kid snippet videos I feel I should post another one too so here is one of my favorites.

Week 3 All Finished!

This third week in ICT class was a pretty laid back week. We started working on our websites. After discussing different websites to assist us with this, I decided to go with weebly.net. Since this is my first time making a website I chose weebly.net because it has a variety of templates to get you started. As well, adding and editing pages has been pretty easy. The biggest problem I have faced so far is just finding pictures without copyright restrictions.

Here are a couple screenshots of my website. Since it is still a work in progress, I have yet to publish it so I cannot supply the link for it yet.

Also since there wasn't a whole lot to report on in this week I thought i'd add a video that we watched in week 2!

Week 2 in ICT Education!

Well after week 2 finished I realized that each class we are covering so many different and useful topics and subjects that is going to be extremely important just so we have a slight idea how to use each of the new sites or applications.

The week started off with us looking at a few examples of eportfolios which was great because we got to see former education students actual portfolios that they have used to help get themselves jobs. Each one was different in their own way so it was encouraging for us to be creative and individualize ours. 

We also talked about the 3 C’s of the Internet: Create, Communicate, Collaborate! I have come to realize I am a little bit of a rookie when it comes to using the  internet with my major experience in creating stuff only coming in the form of creating an email account and facebook account so creating eportfolios and a website is an adventure I am looking forward to! Using the internet to communicate is extremely popular these days with applications like skype, and it is becoming popular in the classroom too. I had attended a p.d last semester and the presenter was a kindergarten teacher who used skype to talk to other classes and even talked to some classes in NewYork. The most helpful C is definitely Collaborate. I intend to stay in touch with my peers over the years to come so we are able to share new ideas and programs with each other. I believe that you can never have too many resources and the fact that they are in the same boat as you just gives more reason to work with them.

I think I am going need a lesson redo for wednesday lesson because our guest speakers Andy and Darren showed us so much so quick. They gave us a quick overview of why technology is important in the education system of today, and showed us some ways to help create pictures for our websites and portfolios. We used the websites compfight.com and pixlr.com. We used compfight.com to find our picture that was not registered or copyrighted by using the creative commons filter. Once we found our picture we used pixlr.com to edit it to our liking.

Well that was the second week of ICT class! 

First Time for Everything

Well here goes nothing....

This is my first time ever making a blog post, in fact i’ve never even read a blog before so this is all very new to me.

This first week in our ICT class was very interesting. We jumped right into things by looking at the course syllabus and by making a word cloud about ICT in the classroom using a program called wordle. I thought this was really interesting activity and can be very useful in the classroom! It gets kids using technology, it can be used as an assessment tool for figuring out what kids already know about a particular subject so it’s a great brainstorming tool. I also like how it is just not writing it down on a piece of paper, or some black and white hand out. The kids can design it the way they like it, and they are on a computer which most kids these days love.

The next day we look at a program called wallwisher which is like an interactive cork board where students are able to type something out and it appears on everybody else’s computers. I thought it was a really interesting way of communicating and plan on using it in a classroom setting, even for a phys ed class. Students could just log on in the evenings and say what they thought of the class, what they didn’t like about it, what would they like to work on tomorrow? It would allow easy communication from student to teacher or vice versa outside of school hours.

Later on in the week we looked at using technology professionally and creating our eporfolios. I am excited to create an eportfolio for the experience and to demonstrate that I am able to use technology to my advantage. I think the more we are able to demonstrate our knowledge of technology and our ways to utilize it our classrooms the more our future employers will be impressed.

Well, that was it! My first blog post! Hope you enjoyed it!