Middle Ages Help Desk Video

This is an old one, but I found it again while doing research for our World History class movie about the middle ages.

Hanging out over the holiday

It seems strange not to be working on any assignments or dealing with any deadlines right now. Our next course, Musical Theory & Education Applications, looks cool. It will be a challenge, though. It looks like we will be making our own music compositions. Yikes! I always liked singing in the choir, and like music in general, but I have no where near the background for creating my own music.

I am borrowing a keyboard from a relative and hope to be able to record in Garage Band, but I still need a snowball mic if I am going to get better sound recordings. Right now I get a lot of echo on my voice when I do podcasts in Garage Band.

As for our last class, I learned some basic of working in Flash. I am glad I already had some experience working in Photo Shop and Adobe Illustrator. I drew most of my stuff by hand or in Illustrator and then imported it into Flash. I still need to fix a synchronization problem I had with my final Flash project. We are using CS5, which apparently has a lot of changes from the earlier versions.

If you would like to see my first efforts, the first (I included it in my last post) is a twiddle...meaning I was just trying out the animation on my own. The second is my opening page for lessons on Medieval times.  The third is my final project  but without the synch correction. I don't dare fix it until it has been graded, so I will correct the timing as soon as I can and re-post it. I also did not have time to animate the mouth on the agent. I want to learn how to do the small animations you can create and use as objects in the program. It was very tricky to try to keep track of everything and my first animation is very amateurish. On the other hand, I've never used Flash before, so they aren't bad first efforts.

Diedra's Wordle for Government Class

Keeping Up

Only a few short weeks until Christmas and I am working hard to complete Cycle 1 of my Action Research Project.  I will soon be posting to my ARP blog (there is a link at the top right of this page), and am learning to do Flash animation.

If you want to see my first Flash animation ever, follow this Link to Flash animation.
Obviously I now need to learn how to stop the animation :-) as this one keeps looping, and I need to learn how to slow the movement down. I decided to try a simple Pong type animation for my first go, just to get used to the controls in CS5 Flash.  My next animation will be an actual assignment for my Digital Media and Education Applications class.

Cool Christmas Flash Mob!

A new chapter begins

As we close things out on the first trimester, we are also starting month 6 in our FSO classes. This month we will be learning how to use Flash. I am both looking forward to that and a little initmidated by the prospect.
I will also begin Cycle 1 in my ARP. The Thanksgiving break will allow me to finish some of the media assets I need. I need more than were required for the ARP Showcase.

My Computer Related Technology students are finishing their cartoon mash-ups. I posted one for Crystal today. Several others are nearly done. We post them on a private Ning site so the students can see their work and that of others in a more personal setting. Most of them are also on YouTube, as I have to upload them to YouTube to get an embed code.

To look at work done by both my students and I on YouTube, Check out my channel, 1to1classroom.

About time to get blogging again...

As you can see by the dates, I've taken a little break from blogging. But now I'm back. Starting month 5 with the need to form a new team because I am in a section with none of my former team members caused me to do a bit of scurrying at the start. And, of course, there is the whole thing about getting the ADDIE proposal done. I can't believe how tired I have been! This is not soley due to the FSO work. My administrator has me teaching Tuesday and Thursday nights from 6-9. I didn't really have a choice, and would not have elected to teach at nights this year as I am making every effort to finish my masters with FSO.

New things - I started a blog to help lead my students through my ARP cycles. This is where I will put electronic surveys, videos, and other media I want to share with them. I didn't list the blog as a media asset, though, as it wasn't a category.

I am currently freezing in my classroom, so I will cut this short. The new heating/cooling units they installed last December are the worst thing I've ever encountered. Fifth hour mine really cuts in and blows very cold air on me the whole time. We wear coats a lot because we never know if we are going to have heat or not. Of course, saying this will raise the ire of some, but it's the truth!

I'll write more when my fingers have thawed.