Set Sail With Technology Week 4

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Using animoto was easy and fun. I could see this as being a great way to make short videos either to share experiences in the classroom such as field trips, special activities such as Jump Rope for Heart, science experiments, just to name a few. I made this one to show off some pictures of my family's trip to Georgia this summer. I made another one from my fourth graders field trip to the Wild Life Refuge, but chose not to put it on here without getting permission from the students' parents. Although I've been to a photostory workshop, and saw many great uses for it, that program is one I'll have to use at school. I was unable to play with it much because I couldn't load it onto my computer. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I couldn't find photostory for a macintosh. I remember Nancy using photostory and talking about a mac, but I can't remember exactly what she said about it. I will experiment with it more during the school year.

Discovery Education is a program I've used many times for several topics and subjects I teach. I'm understanding through researching it more this week, that I don't use it to it's fullness. Hopefully this year I will use it in better ways. Again, the problem I come across is the technology we have in our classrooms is not conducive to using this type of program easily. Many times the videos take an extremely long time to download. Also, my computer that I use for transferring to my television for students to view is very old. It takes an unbelievable amount of time to use Discovery Education.

I had no idea about Teacher Tube! How neat is that? I found it a little difficult at first to find specifically what I was looking for, but with time and practice I'm sure I can improve on my searching. I did find a video that I could use for Black History Month or for lessons when we learn about the Civil Rights Movement. I'm sure I will find others I can use in my classroom. I'm having a tough time embedding the video to my blog. I know it can be done, but it keeps telling me that, "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: DIV. I'll keep working that!