I want to sigh in relief...but it is more like a hiccup. Ahhhh, I'm done...oh wait, maybe the font should be bigger here. OK, now I'm done. Oopps I forgot to add a link to.......and on it goes.
I will sigh on Thursday. I will sigh and sleep in the car as we head out on a road trip. Sorry, (not sorry) to my husband. He will have to do all the driving because I will be sleeping. I am starting to get excited and the idea of being done. But in between the idea of being done and actually being done makes me nervous. Will Dr. Redmond call and say, "Your font is too small, your sentences too long and you forgot to do blog #147 on April the 8th." Those are the things that I dream about. Will someone tell us the week before that we have a six minute video to complete...oh wait, that already happened. I am sort of in "worst-case-senario" mode. And I probably will be until Thursday. If the amount of pride in accomplishment is directly proportional to the amount of work and time put into this trimester....we should all feel extremely proud of ourselves on Wednesday! Until Wednesday my friends!
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If so, you must be in Touro's Innovative Learning Cohort 11. And like me, I am sure you have spent a lot of time with your computer. Everyone is saying, "You can do it! The end is in sight!" "The end is in sight?!"....should I feel relief? Or panic? Can I get it all done in time? The answer has to be yes! I will get it done. I will stop fiddling with fonts, color combinations and looking for that "just right" graphic. I will get it done. My current approach to working is to work on one project (video, website, or poster) until I am so sick of it that I want to spit. Then I move to another project and repeat spitting procedure. As of now, I have worked on all three projects, but have not finished any. I have yet to decide if this is a good tactic or not...but it the only one that I've got right now. I have run into a few glitches on Weebly. I will walk away from my computer and when I get back it will show the below message. So I couldn't work on that page. To add a bit more fun, after refreshing, my work was erased...twice. Lesson learned, type in a google doc and then cut and paste into Weebly... super annoying.
My other wonderings are about the poster. I looked at other posters and found quite a variety in the headings on the posters. I also found that the wording on the posters was not as "Academic Journal Jargon-y" as our research papers were.
Alright, time to get back to one of my projects. I avoided the video...I had nightmares about the video. I finally had to face my fears and sit down and do it. Time? Do you have a lot of it? Well, you need to in order to do a 90 second video. I think my 90 second video has taken about 10 hours...and I am not finished.
I am using iMovie, but I don't have a lot of video footage. Which I have found is ok. I am using slides to animate objects and then using screencast-o-matic to video that animation and then uploading that into iMovie. So far it is working out ok. The tricky part will be that I can't edit the clips very easily. Some of my slide animations are too slow, I will need to edit them in slides, re-screencast them and re-upload. But I think it is giving me the look I want rather than relying on the limited use of the titles in iMovie. I am not entirely done...I need to cut about 16 seconds...and I want to add something. That is a tricky place to be. I think I will wait and get some feedback from my cohort friends to see if they think something needs to be added, and what they feel could be shorter or cut. I find that if I wander too far in this iMovie forest I can get lost for hours on the wrong path. I think my best best is to sit here and wait for reinforcements. Isn't that what you are supposed to do when lost, sit tight and wait for help? At this point in time I have completed a very, very rough draft of my storyboard & script. It is so rough that I will need to add to it before class. I am feeling...PANIC. I don't know why, but this video project is giving me hives. I feel like I should have taken some video clips of kids, at school, in a classroom....but I didn't and school is out. I decided to use iMovie because I have used it before. When I say I used it before, I mean I through together some baby videos of my kids about 5 years ago...so I am not exactly an expert. I watched the 1 hour iMovie tutorial, which was great. So now I know how to edit video clips together, but where am I getting these video clips????? I have a few ideas of what I want it to look like, but will I be able to achieve that, I don't know.
I guess my next steps are: 1. Look at a lot of videos on LIL. What did other people do? 2. Compile all of the pieces I want to include, graphs, graphics etc. 3. Find a copyright free site for video clips. 4. Find out if I can use clips of videos that I already have...like from Edutopia. 5. Prepare small screen cast clips. I liked Screencast-o-matic, will that be professional enough? 6. Keep updating my storyboard. OK...now my to-do list is making me panic. I also need to do a lot of this work from a hotel in LA while my family goes to Universal Studios. I guess I better get to work. Often I am amazed by Google. They have a program, like Google Sheets, and random people write add-ons or script editors to make it better. It is like a giant "suggestion" box that actually gets read and the suggestions get tried out and turned into real solutions.
I explored all the add-ons and sometimes I feel like I need the background context of why the add-ons was created to understand how or why I would use it. For example, when I explored Row Call, I couldn't really understand when I would use it. Then, I found a youtube video made the mother of the writer of Row Call. She explained how she graded student work using a rubric on a google form. Her finished spreadsheet was all the students' grades for that one assignment. She then used Row Call to split each student into their own spread sheet page...so she had a grade book page for each student. A-ha! I get it. Here is a link to the video. I liked Form Limiter, but I rarely need to but a time limit on a form. I could imagine teachers using it when they need a limited number of parents to sign up for field trips, or kids to sign up for projects. I would want to play around with in more and see how to limit certain columns but still allow other columns. Choice Eliminator 2 is great. Instantly, I think of signing up for Parent Conferences, because this is always a nightmare for teachers. However, there is a huge Warning from the writer stating that the program doesn't work when multiple people log in at the exact same time (like during Back to school night). However, I thought of 2 work arounds. #1 Have one computer set up in the room during Back to School night, so that parents can only sign up one at a time. And/or #2 send out a link to the conference sign up so that parents can sign up later and not all at the same time. I have used Auto-Crat to create mail merge type documents before. It is a bit trickier and probably wouldn't be used as much by teachers at my school, unless they were the techie teachers. Form Mule is my new fav! I love that it can easily send an email thank you, or response. I used it with both of my "sample" google forms. For this weeks assignment I created a prototype of a form that many teachers at my school could use during back to school night. I will need to add/refine it for next year. Then each teacher can copy the basic form and edit it to their classroom needs.Here is the link to the "Super Back to School Night Form". It includes:
The other google form I created was to get feedback about my logo from this cohort. I played around with the various logo making sites and I realized that Canva had a logo making section as well. I have used Canva before and found that it had a few graphic design tools that I wanted, like you could make some colors transparent. I could not decide if I wanted my logo to read "Talk to Learn" or "Talk 2 Learn". So I created a google for with branching questions. Then I added some color choices. This form will hopefully give me some great feedback as to the most effective and appealing logo. It also allowed me to use google forms in an authentic way. Here is the link to the Logo google form. Feel free to fill it out, I would love all the feedback I can get. As an academic specialist I use Google Forms all the time to collect feedback from teachers. I have used them to find out what type of professional learning they would like. I have used them after a professional development to get feedback on likes, dislikes and next steps. I have also used them to schedule meetings between many participants. I have even created an auto-crat fill in the blank story for a 2nd grade PBL unit. I have used Forms a lot, but only with adults. Next year, I am hoping to try it in new ways.
What I haven't done is use Forms in the classroom. As an academic specialist, I am out of the classroom, so I haven't had the opportunity to use the Google Forms with kids. I think I would use Google Forms ALL the TIME in a classroom. I think that Google Forms is very simple to use. I love the new quiz feature. The fact that it can automatically grade quizzes is amazing. I think that Google Forms is beneficial to every teacher. Many primary teachers at my school see Google Forms as a tool for older kids. Not true. Next year, I plan to use examples of how Google Forms can be use for all ages. Our school will be getting Google Classroom for the first time next year. There will be a lot of new information for teachers to learn. I think it will be critical for me to use Classroom & Forms in as many ways as possible so that I can support the learning for my teachers. I am hoping that I can create my own Google Classroom account, but use my teachers as my "students". Then I can model how assignments are given, corrected and turned in. It will also allow me to go through the learning process with my staff, uncover common pitfalls and share helpful tips. I am excited to use Google Forms in new ways, other than collecting staff feedback. |