Final MMP Project

Hey everyone! Below is my screencast for my finalized MMP project.

http://kraftclassroom.weebly.com

MMP Reflection

The objective that I had in mind when creating the idea for my MMP was to create an organized website that can help students with missing class and needing make up work. When I was student teaching, absences in my classroom happened at a very high rate. The students would come back to class after missing days of work and asked for the work they missed. I rarely ever received their make-up work, and I did not see any of them borrow notes from their classmates. The website that I created was meant for them to find the make-up assignments there, and set up a means for them to turn in assignments. On the “class materials” tab, there are two different sets of materials provided for the students. There are slideshows of the notes that they missed that day, so they can scroll at their own pace and copy down the notes from there. Also, accompanying the slideshow, are screencasts of the same slideshows. These screencasts, however, contain the lectures that I would give to the students in class. I usually add extra information when presenting the material to the students, so I did not want them to miss any of the information that the other students received.

The role of technology in my project does reflect what we have learned this semester. I wanted to incorporate different aspects from this course that I now have experience with, to expose these means of technology to my students. This was seen through the design principles that were kept in mind when creating the layout of my site, and the importance of and relationship of audio and video to enhance the learning process. Also, the discussion questions being turned in on the website rather than on a piece of paper in school, helps the students familiarize themselves with using technology inside and outside of the classroom.

I feel very accomplished at the end of my project. My final website was created on Weebly after some unfortunate occurrences. I originally looked at Weebly to create my class website on, but I decided to use Google Classroom inside, because I did not think I would have the capabilities to properly design a Weebly site. After making two Google Classrooms, and being removed from both, I only had a week to create my new MMp site. Within that week, I was able to create a site on Weebly; one that I think is better than the one that I had planned on Google Classroom. One of the design principles that I picked up in this course and used on my website was the use of white space. ALthough there are graphics at certain spaces of my site, the overall feel, seems to have a planned simplicity about it due to the white spaces on the different pages.

Since I am not a teacher yet, this website currently does not have a specific purpose. Instead, I see it as more of a guideline of what to use in my future classroom. When I obtain a teaching position, I will most likely upgrade to the Premium version of Weebly to have more capabilities. With the added uses, I would constantly build my website with each unit.The website as it is, is an example of what the website would look like for a specific unit. When I have my own classroom, I plan on having the different units being the different pages. For example, this website discussed the unit of post-Revolutionary War America. With many many units to cover, I would have one page for post-Revolutionary War America, that contains all of the class materials, do-nows, and discussion questions. The other tabs would also contain the different units that we will end up learning throughout the year. The implementation of this site would help keep me organized as a new teacher. The students would be responsible for keeping up with the website as a requirement for their grade. If it ends up being successful, I would share it with my fellow teachers to share and receive tips and advice.

Blog Post #8

For this blog post, I will be providing you guys with my technology toolkit, which contains the different sources or multimedia components that I found best helpful throughout the duration of this class. Yes, I did specifically choose the tools that I found interesting, but I decided to use these ones because I found them to be the most helpful to me. Starting this class, I did not have much design or multimedia tool experience, so I was on the lookout for easy to use tools that can enhance my creations. The different tools included are extremely user friendly, and with some practice, there are high possibilities of becoming very compatible with these tools. This toolkit was used on the site, PearlTrees, which I would thank my classmates for making me aware of this tool.

1. Aviary- Aviary is an easy to use photo editor that allows users to make many changes to the photos that they choose to add. The reason that I chose Aviary was because it was a free editing tool that I would be able to use on the photos that I show my students during lectures. I could highlight the pictures to make it easier for students to examine or crop and blur certain parts of the photos to make clear what the focus of the picture should be.

2. iMovie- iMovie is a video editor that I have used for a couple different reasons. During student teaching, I took a video of myself teaching, however, the total video length was 45 minutes, which was way too long for the 10 minute requirement that I had for my class. I used iMovie, through an app on my phone, to cut out certain parts of the video and create smooth transitions. It can also be used to create vibrant slideshows because you can add fun transitions, sound, and captions.

3. Google Slides- Google Slides might seem like a very basic feature that is very well known, but it is still my go-to slideshow maker. The reason that I like it is because of the accessibility aspect to it. Knowing that I would be able to pull up my slideshow creation on any computer makes me much more confident in my teaching. Also, if you need to upload your slides to a certain website, you can easy download it as a slideshow and upload it from there.

4. Animoto- Animoto is another tool that can be used to create a slideshow of photo. A good use of this would be to create a sort of a "virtual field trip" for your students. If you have visited a certain place, that might be too far or too expensive to bring your students, you can show them all of the pictures that you took so that they can have the visitor experience.

5. Screencast-o-matic- Screencast-o-matic was one f my favorite tools throughout this course. Beforehand, I would see screencasts and think that they were very difficult to create. With this tool, it makes screencasts very simple. You just have to launch the recorder and it simply records what you do. Once you're done, you just save your video as an mp4 and its just as easy as that.

6. Vocaroo- Vocaroo is a tool that can be used to record audio that you create. It is extremely easy to use. The reason that I chose this website it because you can have your students create podcasts that express their opinion on certain topics that are being discussed in the classroom. It can take classroom collaboration and discussion to a whole new level.

7. Weebly- Lastly, Weebly is a tool that helps you design your own website. I ran into trouble on my MMP and had to start from scratch twice, so I decided to switch things up and use Weebly for the website for the project. I found that it is pretty easy to use and has different design templates that gives your site a professional design.

MMP Update #2

Hey everyone, if you want to try out my site, the code for the classroom is pykey68.  

Week 10 Discussion Post, Participation Gap

I am not a full time teacher yet, but the subject field of the participation gap that is existent in schools is a topic that needs to be written about more. As stated in the discussion question, the participation gap is held by students that realize that they do not have the same opportunities, resources, and/or knowledge, which then then use to form a low self-worth or have issues with identity. The decreased value of themselves that they see, in turn, affects there participation in school or halts their drive to succeed. Many factors can be prevalent in an issue such as one like this, however, since this is a web-design course, we can talk about how technology can play a role in this.

I only have two different teaching experiences, one was during my practicum in a diverse middle class area with a very high access to technology, and my student teaching in a similar district demographically, just with less access to technology. My practicum classroom, was a middle school classroom where each student was given their own Chromebook and participated digitally in the teacher's Google Classroom website. The class I student taught in had a projector in the classroom, and had access to computer labs if the teacher reserved the lab for particular dates.

The middle school students I taught were very proficient in technology at such a young age. They new how to download documents, annotate pdfs on the computer, conduct research, and understand the workings of Google Classroom. I am not too sure if all the high school students in my student teaching experience were able to do the same. Most of them did know how to use certain google apps, and conduct basic research. Although they did not have their own personal computers in the classroom, I think they were pretty knowledgeable in digital literacy mainly due from their personal experiences with smartphones, laptops, and other devices.

Although the students from my student teaching did not have as many resources in the classroom, they still had enough resources out of school that they were able to participate in the classroom. However, what about the students that do not have those resources inside or outside of the classroom? What if a school cannot afford computers for the students, and families cannot afford to have laptops? This can affect those students in the long run. Students who might not have the resources outside of school might not have the right skill set to keep up inside a classroom. On the other hand students without any resources that others have might have difficulty in the future when it comes to aspects like getting into college, or getting a job. The reason for that is mainly because since they do not have the resources, they do not have the experience using them. So when they get into the job market or into a college class, that student can fall behind. For this reason, educators must find a way to close this participation/educational gap. This is why we need creative teachers in districts that might have a lot of resources, because they can have the students build their critical thinking and inquiry skills that can help them face the challenges that they have ahead and overcome them.

Blog Post #7

The topic of copyright is a very important issue to discuss whether it is for the blog posts for this course or in the actual teaching process. At times throughout this course, the directions called for us to use non-copyrighted images for our videos. I appreciated that in our directions because it helped me find out how to find materials and images that are free from copyright that would be very useful to use. Despite having some experience during this course, I still need to learn about teachers and copyrighted materials because I want to be able to optimize the classroom by using materials, however, I do not want to get into any trouble while doing so.

In order to learn more, I used some resources from "Five-Minute Film Festival: Copyright and Fair Use for Educators." The first resource that I decided to use was "YouTube Copyright Basics." I was drawn to this resource mainly because of the title. During my student teaching experience, I tried to incorporate YouTube videos into my lectures to keep the students engaged and interested. After reading that title, I am curious to see if I had violated any copyrights while doing so. However, after watching the video, I quickly realized that simply showing any YouTube videos would not violate the copyright laws. Those laws mainly deal with creating the videos that go onto the site. The resource was actually pretty entertaining and could be used by people of all ages, even students. The copyright laws were explained by two puppets and the video used humor to explain the laws, thus making it more interesting. This technique took information that could be viewed as "boring" and really communicated it in a way that was explained simply and effectively. I would definitely recommend this video to those who want to learn more.

This can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp1Jn4Q0j6E&list=PLvzOwE5lWqhTbOCIFp_OxsN6nC-l20kMT&index=4

For the text resource from the list, I chose was "Teaching Copyright" which can be found on teaching copyright.org. I originally wanted to use a resource that discussed that told teachers about copyright laws and the materials that they use in their classrooms. Unfortunately, those links were broken, so instead, I picked the only other think with "teach" in the title since the YouTube video already gave me the basics of copyright laws. The basis of the site is not really completely applicable unless you are teaching copyright laws to your students, because it provides a curriculum for you to use to do so. However, there is a resources tab found on the site that can be helpful. As a visitor to the site, you can click on the links that would have been giving to the students, and learn about copyright that way. For example, they have copyright cases, videos, podcasts, and history information available. This is very important because as a teacher you want to be able to use resources in your classroom, however, at the same time, you do not want to take any credit from anyone else's work. This can be a subject you bring up to your students before you assign any projects or research papers to them.

This can be found at: https://www.teachingcopyright.org/about.html

MMP Update #1

Check out my MMP Update for this week!

Blog #6 Mini Art School

Part 1

Hey everybody! As finding out during this week's reading and videos, the MMP calls for me to create a storyboard. I find the concept of a storyboard pretty interesting, especially after seeing the examples that were used. I was worried that they needed to be very detailed pictures or descriptions completely mapped out, however, it is quite the opposite. I found out that having it sloppy can actually be better in the long run because it allows for more imagination down the road. I decided to handwrite my storyboard because I felt like it give me more opportunities to put down the vision that I saw in my head. I thought that the pictures would be boring if drawn literally, so I decided to put a little creative twist into my pictures. I apologize in the advance for the drawings and my messiness towards the end.

Part 2
To create a visual for multimodality, I decided to create a moving media production with the help of iMovie. I took free stock images from Stocksnap.io and unsplashed.com since they do not have any licensing issues. I wanted to show the beauty of multimodality and movement, so this is what I came up with (Sorry for the corniness):