Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Flash

Up to now the extent of my Flash usage has been pretty minimal. It has been primarily contained to computer games (yes I’m a gamer) and the occasional website that has a flashy header (pun intended) or annoying advertisements. Even though I knew I’d learn tons more about computers, I don’t think I ever thought I’d learn how to make Flash animation. My first attempt at it was extremely poor, and has absolutely no place in the classroom. It literally shows a ball bouncing around the screen, and a blue hand (if you can call it that) chasing it.

As an educator, I know the value of Flash in the classroom. The textbook that I use for ELA, WriteSource contains a CD that has a number of Flash animation exercises that my students do enjoy playing. We run it as a game, and give the students turns up at the SMARTBoard. I love giving my students the opportunity to play with educational games, and explore in ways that I did not have.

I hope that soon my skills with Flash improve somewhat so that what I create is a little bit better than my first attempt; however, I do not think that anything I make will ever compare to Carnegie Hall Listening Adventures, which I think would be an absolutely amazing resource for a music teacher. It broke the piece down, and assigned visuals to each individual selection.

Project-Based Learning: Module 1 Assignment

There are times over the past year and a half that I have been forced to look at myself through a different lens than the rest of the TEAM I am younger than most of you. For many of you, this is your second Masters; this is my first. I remember using technology when I was in middle school, and I remember the birth (per say) of Project-Based Learning. As a middle school student, in one of the best districts on Long Island, I thought it was terrible. I remember them giving us all of these assignments with little guidance, and expecting us to do mountains of work. That was back before things were really fully thought out.

Now, as a teacher in a school where nothing is ideal, I still am not a fan, but for very different reasons. I watched the three videos from Edutopia, and the second one actually made me quite angry. In that video I saw something that I never see in my classroom; I saw students who cared about their work, students who cared about the world around them, cared about how others viewed them. Last week, I gave my students an assignment that I thought they would enjoy and have very little trouble with, since they were all extremely excited about the inauguration of President Obama, I decided that we would write business letters to the President explaining why his presidency is important to us. Few of my students, could even give one reason why it was important…I had to prompt them that it was important that he was the first African American President. In this type of environment, it is very difficult for me to be excited about anything, especially something that requires the students to generate the learning. Maybe next year, Project-Based Learning will sit better with me…