I can’t finally start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Every day it gets brighter and brighter as I complete an assignment or one more page on my website. This year has been challenging to say the least, but I have grown so much at the same time. I have overcome huge emotional roasters and persevered. Finding the right balance between being a mom, a wife, a teacher and a student is not an easy task. With all of my new knowledge, I am excited about this upcoming school year. Once I have worked out the kinks I look forward to being able to share this knowledge with my colleagues. I am very appreciative to Touro University for having a master’s program that is applicable to my work in the classroom and not just a fancy degree. My journey to completing my master’s degree will end in less than a week, but my learning will be everlasting.
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I find that editing is what takes the longest. It doesn’t matter if its a video, a slide deck or even a poster, they all take forever to edit! One small change means shifting and altering every other text box on that page. At some point you just have to walk away and say “I’m done!” I feel that way about my poster. After another hour of editing visual parts to my poster this morning I am finally done. Now I just need feedback before I can start working on my video. I definitely do not want to have to redo my entire video because I used the wrong version of my poster. Fingers crossed I can finish my website this week,start my video Monday and edit on Tuesday. Then I am DONE!!! I guess the question I have is, when do we have to submit our link to our video for Wednesday’s presentation? I hope it’s not before midnight on Tuesday. Everything has to be done in order and I am now feeling to pressure of time. 6 days left and counting! I got this!!
Editing is SO time consuming! Something that seems as easy and a drag of a picture isn’t really that easy. I wish that you could just click on the picture, type how many seconds you want it to play and then move on. Instead, what should take 5 minutes turn into an hour. It really wasn’t that hard, but sometimes technology just doesn’t work the way you think it should. Maybe my problems will be fixed through an update in the near future. That is the nice part about technology. It is always changing and bug/glitches are always being fixed.
This week I also started on my poster and everything seems to be going smoothly. I made a copy of one of the samples that I like and I am changing out one section at a time. Once the text is my words I change the heading color so that I can see what I have done and an example of what I have left to do. Hopefully I can finish today since my executive summary is now complete. Fingers crossed I can copy and paste with little editing. I will let know you on my next blog posting how it goes. The end is near! I can almost taste it!!! Who knew that a 63 second video would take all day to complete? Well, it did. Plus I now have a massive headache. I had a clear vision for my video with -roll footage but once again Adobe Spark was not my friend with adding video clips. I wasn’t able to upload my video that I took of my daughter. The formatting wasn’t right, so I abandoned ship and went to WeVideo. In hindsight, I should have ditched the b-roll footage and just stuck with pictures. I ended up using Wevideo as my final video editor knowing that I would have to pay for a month subscription to not have the watermark show, but what I was not expecting was the additional upgrade fee that I had to pay to use their pictures and video clip when I went to publish my video. I guess that’s not included in their packages. It’s an additional package fee. What I thought would take me two hours has over doubled in time. Hence, why I now have a massive headache.
I found adjusting the time for the images to be difficult once the transitions were added. It became easier to delete the image and reinsert it in order to adjust the time accordingly. I was surprised that I was able to shorten my video by 20 seconds by recording my voiceover and then adjusting my images. Overall, I am pleased with the end product. How can I be of service? Well, first I feel that I need more time to implement all that I have learned this past year before I can be of service to others. I have dabbled here and there but I am still perfecting my practice as far as T-Pack is concerned. Now that I have selected technology tools that will aid me in my craft, I need to see how it all comes together. Only then can I ask myself, Was I successful or do I need to make some more modifications? Once I feel a little more confident in my own 21st century skills, I plan to share my capstone with colleagues and family members that teach in different towns and states.
In the meantime, I have no problem sharing the importance of digital citizenship and bringing awareness to my site. I have already shared a video that I created with one of my site coaches. I had asked if this was something that I should share at the beginning of the year. She agreed that most teachers were not aware of the Common Sense Media lesson plans that our district wants us to be teaching and that my video would help highlight this valuable teaching tool. Especially since resources are available in Spanish and everything that we send home is written in English and in Spanish. Ideally, I would love to see my work help other just like me. Teachers who want to learn more to better their practice with incorporating 21st century skills but feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. When looking at the two storyboard options I decided to try Storyboard That. Not only have I heard Alicia say good things about it, but I also wanted to use the website on my capstone. In order to write about it, I needed to have used it. Looking back on my experience today, I realized how engaging and distracting this website can be. I found myself spending more time editing the scenery and characters which I won’t use on my video than I did writing the script that I will use. For some reason, I wasn’t able to get the text to change colors. It would have been nice to have the speaker notes in a different color than the notes for myself.
Storyboard That can create some great storyboards to use in the classroom, but a student guideline would need to be created in order for students to not get lost in the details. Overall, I found this site to be user friendly with a professional look that can be created in a short amount of time. As far as using an editor for my video, I am thinking about using WeVideo. I had experimented with this site a few times this past year and it might be the right site that allows quiet background music. I know that when we were uploading a video to Adobe Spark it was very difficult to hear over the background music. You were not able to adjust the background sound. No matter what we tried the audio recording between the voiceover and the video clips were not consistent. Since I plan to upload a recording of struggling reader and B-roll footage, WeVideo might be a better application to use. What is TPACK? You are probably already using this framework and you don’t even know it. TPACK is a framework the combines the area of pedagogy, content and technology. Teachers are always trying to find ways to make their lessons more engaging for students and that is where the technological area of TPACK comes in. Technology isn’t the lesson, but it is the way in which a lesson can be delivered.
As I reflect on my own journey this past year, I can really see how I have evolved as a 21st century teacher. Before, I didn’t have a very large technology tool kit. Now I can see the value in game based learning, digital storytelling or mapping, online quizzes that provide students with immediate feedback, brain break videos that are content based, and so much more. The TPACK framework has reminded me that technology is an added component to HOW I teach, not a replacement. I am excited about my student’s future and my future as an educator. The idea of logo making was overwhelming at first, so I took a quick look at Logomakr.com on Monday before class was over. Then I felt a little better until I started working on it today. I wasn’t able to look at any icons so I had to checkout other websites. The canva website didn’t have a lot of free icons without a background so I ended up making my logo on Graphicsprings.com. Overall, it was fairly simple to use. Trying to figure out how to add text was my biggest challenge. I finally figured out that the identity icon was where I could edit or add text by adding a tagline. This text appeared smaller than my company name and then I could modify the font, size, color and location. I had finally made my logo and then it came time to download. Well, that was a problem. This website will not allow you to save your work or download it unless you pay $19.99 for a JPG with no editing, $39.99 for editing and $99.99 for the Vector file which is what we will need for printing our poster. Now I’m in a pickle, do I pay for it or wait for the Logomaker.com website to start working again? For now, I took a picture to upload my Logo to the homework sheet but this might change as I really don’t want to pay $100 for a logo when I can download a basic image for free on Logomakr or $19 for the professional version.
Transliteracy is a term that I knew nothing about, until 10 months ago. It is a term that is trending right now. Is it really a trend or a major change in education to stop a vicious cycle? You always hear veteran teachers talk about how when you teach long enough you will see the pendulum swing back and forth. Well, they are right. After 11 years of teaching I have seen just that. The teaching profession has shifted from fidelity to adopted curriculum to now using supplemental materials when needed to teach the standards. I see transliteracy as the middle point in this constant battle of what is the best way to increase test scores nationwide. It’s taking the “old school” way of paper/pencil and direct instruction and merging it with the “new school” way of technology and collaboration. Blending and merging two very different styles of teaching in my opinion will produce the best possible outcome. In time, transliteracy might just be what we need for more students to be proficient. Student can be support at their ability level all while engaging them in the lesson or course work. This is what will ultimately increase test scores. Those struggling students need to be engaged and adding technology pieces to the content and pedagogy might be just what they need to succeed. Comments Yes, I see Transliteracy as a mixing bowl of different strategies being mixed into one. Teaching is such a difficult job. There are so many different moving pieces that play a part in a person learning. Transliteracy is trying to mix them all together to best suit the students learning. I know for myself depending on what I am learning plays a large role in how I need the information presented. As a teacher I find myself struggling with sticking to the curriculum with fidelity and mixing in more options that can better reach the needs of my students. Shawn Thinking about our struggling students, do you think it possible to create something in padlet that we can share to support those students in both of our classes, then stretching out to our grade level. I would like to brainstorm, how we might use transliteracy to better provide unified support for special needs students. Could we not create something using transliteracy that all the students could have access to. Very exciting idea. Thank you. Helen My intended audience of my capstone website is for primary grade teachers. As a third grade teacher, I feel that my research can be helpful to any elementary teacher who is using or wants to use technology in their classroom. On my Learn More page I want to have a brief explanation of how my research paper evolved, a guide on how to access information on this the capstone, and videos that support 21st century concepts.
I need to have concise, bulleted information that is easy to read. As teachers we are always busy and learning something new can be hard and time consuming. If I simplify what I learned and the steps needed to recreate it, then I have helped those who have looked at my site. As I looked at the example capstone projects, I started to feel overwhelmed until I got to the last one. I realized that I just have to start building my pages and it will all start to come together. I have done the research, experimented with different technology tools now it’s just time to practice by putting it all together. I’m not sure if the order was intentional, but I am ending my night on a high note. I CAN do it! |
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July 2018
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