Digital Badge #8--Chapter 9

Digital Badge #8--Chapter 9

If I had read the title of this chapter--Expressing Creativity with Multimedia Technologies--six or eight weeks ago, I would have thought, "I don't have a creative bone in my body, and technology won't help THAT at all".  What a difference a few weeks and a lot of patience makes!

The section on PowerPoint, beginning on page 220, was very timely, as a young man from Dunbar High School just won a prize for being the best PowerPoint creator in the world.  The WORLD!  That is pretty awesome for a high school student, and for the high school.  We have come so far since the days when PowerPoint was basically a bunch of slides tied together with some sliding type or flipping pages.  While visiting our grandkids one spring, we were able to see Brigham, who was in the third grade, present his PowerPoint on Bengal tigers.  I don't have to tell you, Grandma was IMPRESSED!  He understood a concept many adults forget:  the slides should be attention-getters, not a script for the teacher to read aloud to the group (p. 224).  And now, Grandma will have to share her PowerPoint with him; after all, Education is Everywhere!

Beginning on page 225, the section on video in the classroom really caught my eye.  The number of resources that are available is amazing, and it is easy to find videos that are suitable for children and also cover the content you are teaching.  I was not aware that YouTube had an Education channel; that will certainly save a lot of time digging through totally inappropriate videos!

The section explaining strategies for using cameras with students (p. 234) made some points I had not considered.   Generating, editing, and publishing student writing would not have occurred to me as an area where video cameras would be of use.  Having taught reading in summer school, I can attest to the fact that students don't consider setting or characters when writing.  What a great way to illustrate the necessity of these parts of a story!  Creating a video production area in the classroom would certainly help a teacher use videography regularly and not just on special occasions, and also recording events as they happen.  What a wonderful "diary" of the school year can be created when all the pieces are put together, maybe with some background music (depending on the sound quality of the original videos).

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin, Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.