The Final Video

This took an excruciatingly long time to upload.  With this being the last assignment of the semester, the "upload complete" prompt couldn't have been sweeter!

Overall, this class has been a joy.  Suggestions from everyone have opened up a new world of technologies and how to apply them in today's classroom.

The link to the video, as required in the "Technofy a Lesson" is available BY CLICKING HERE.

Hope everyone has a great summer.  All the best.  

Technofing Revolution

I.  


After a history course this semester, I've become fascinated with the French Revolution.  Dietrich Bonhoffer, a prominent German philosopher, called the French Revolution the beginning on the decline of western civilization, the time when western man became disillusioned with himself.  David A. Bell, writing in The First Total War:  Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, argued "the modern era has unfolded in the shadow of the French Revolution.  The growth of republics and liberal democracies, the spread of secularism, the development of modern ideologies and the invention of total war all mark their birth during the French Revolution."  I had heard the argument that the Industrial Revolution was similar in consequence and wanted to explore the similarities between these two events.  So, as much for my own learning as for my future students, I thought I'd put together my technofied lesson on this topic, the French Revolution.


I found an interesting lesson plan at PBS.org.  A PDF version of the original lesson plan is available for download BY CLICKING HERE.


II.  


The side by side comparison of the original lesson plan and my revised version is available as a Word document BY CLICKING HERE.


III.   


The stand alone revised lesson plan is available as a Word document BY CLICKING HERE. 


IV.  


A 500 word justification for technology application is available as a Word document BY CLICKING HERE.


V.  


A short video describing some of the tech features, as soon as it uploads, will follow.






  

A Polished Blog

I've had a great time re-working some of the design elements.  I actually like the update that Google has done their Blogger platform.  I had the goal of creating a minimalist feel to my blog, trying to keep distractions to a minimum.  It would, however, be nice to incorporate ads and start generating some revenue!  With that in mind, here's a list of some of things I re-worked:

1. I messed around with fonts, font size, background color, link color, and the date/time headings.
2. I renamed my blog.
3. Reformatted the introductions to each post so that they are uniform. 
4. Reformatted videos and images so they appear uniform.
5. Uploaded a higher resolution video of my "personal story, part 2" assignment.   

Wibaux Revised

Given the low quality of my "personal story 2" video, I thought I take some time to upload a higher resolution video.  Wibaux:  Take Two, is below.

A Quest For Truth

In this WebQuest, students will be asked to explore truth on the internet while learning more about the 2012 Presidential candidates.  I chose to use QuestGarden and found it a fairly easy platform to work with.  You'll find the link below.  

A WebQuest Search for Truth on the Internet

Presentation Software Presentation

This went a little longer than I had hoped, so I hope people can still muster the courage to sit through the video. Anyway, for this assignment, I chose to finally figure out how to use the 'screen capture' function on Macs. I'm sure Windows probably has a similar feature. I also explored the use of Twitter in the classroom and created a short Prezi on that topic, the Prezi starts at about 2:30 mark of the movie if you get impatient.

Wibuax's Future

This assignment allowed to me to make use of some footage that has been taking up valuable space on my hard drive for far too long. It's a short piece on Wibaux, Montana. Wibaux is my dad's hometown. To ease export from Final Cut, the editing program I used, I dropped the quality quite a bit. Therefore, video quality is quite low. Sorry.

All content, other than the U.S. Census Maps and Google Map, is mine.