Technology is ever changing. With those changes comes a need for teachers to be ever learning so as to help their students understand and use technology, as well as utilize tools which help students engage and, hopefully, make teaching easier. Throughout this course, we utilized various functions of technology. While most are not going to be all that useful for the preschool realm, I did learn about different applications.
Having used Blogger before, most of my learning came from learning how to embed audio and PDFs. I found Google applications much easier to embed than Microsoft applications. I am still not sure how to make the dimensions perfect for the PSA audio file, but even after talking to my brother, who used to know html coding, I have had to accept that I have not figured that out. I went ahead and played with the “Pages,” as I was curious how those work now compared to when I used them ten years ago. As it turned out, not much has changed.
I had used Google Form for work, and for personal use when taking birth predictions shortly before our daughter was due. I did not receive much feedback from peers as I did not repost my blog address. In general, I have not had much traffic on my blog (I took a look at the stats each week), probably due to that fact.
My first personal tale was an experiment with the Photos app on my computer. I found it fairly easy to use, although I would have liked the ability to control animations and transitions. I also found it hard to record and sync the audio to the timing of the slides. I tried Googling the project that was mentioned in the assignment brief, but nothing informational came up. Different examples that were vastly varied came up, so that was not helpful. After receiving feedback, I realized that a story with a beginning, middle, and end was probably preferred criteria. The hardest part of that expectation was keeping the tale to one to two minutes. For the second personal tale, I chose to tell a bit about my great grandmother using Powerpoint. Two minutes did not do her justice, but c’est la vie. I found Powerpoint to have more of the features I wanted. I could control layout of the slides, animations, transitions, overlay audio and music. The best part was that I could record the whole presentation in Powerpoint and then, re-record individual slides as needed. My audio was not as professional as I might have liked, but after talking to others that have better backgrounds in recording have told me a lot of it is the quality of microphone. I struggled with embedding the video as either the audio, music, or transition and animations would not work correctly. My husband helped me realize that I could just save it as an Mp4 and upload it that way. I was quite satisfied with the overall result.
I found myself wanting to add other features into my Google Earth Tour that were not available (mainly, looking at the 360o photos). For my own teaching purposes, the online Google Earth would be efficient and adequate. My husband and I enjoyed all the supplemental games and materials that were available through the online version.
My dive into Prezi was not my favorite assignment. As I had actively avoided the software previously, I was working with a brand-new-to-me application. I am not sure if I found it hard to manipulate because I am more of a straight-line type planner or if the free version is just clunkier as a ploy to get you frustrated enough to purchase a subscription. Either way, I did not find it appealing. I think for a first-time use, my presentation was sufficient.
Regarding the Tech Course Magazine article, Google Docs worked okay. I have learned that writing any assignment should be done offline and copy and pasted to stave off saving problems caused by internet connection issues. Copying and pasting from Word to Docs did not keep all my formatting, although I was able to quickly fix it. I do like how easily Docs lets a horizontal line be placed in the document.
Overall, I learned some new skills that may be useful in the future. I also was intrigued to learn about iKeepSafe and will be sharing that site with my supervisors. As technology keeps changing, I hope to keep mostly apprised of the most important applications and dangers, so as to benefit my students.
