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.

Rubric

I thought that many of our classmates designed great rubrics. After looking back through the discussion following our first stories, I thought that many people made good points concerning what goes into a great video. I tried to encapsulate some of the best ideas into my rubric. And I'm even reconsidering my point about credits. Credit where credit is due! I just wish there was a an easier way to do them so they don't appear as if I'm scrolling down in a Word document.

Introducing Iter

This is the first public announcement of a little side project I've been working on for a couple of years. Still waiting for the first donation.  I tried to go with some hand made signs and sketches which is inspired by some of our classmates videos.

Smart Grammar

I chose to do a simple grammar lesson that explains using comparative adjectives. I downloaded the SmartNotebook software and then went over to the TRC on campus to use their SmartBoard and capture the presentation on video. This was my first experience with SmartBoards.

At first, I found the software to be a little overwhelming, however, after watching a couple of tutorials online I quickly got the hang of it.

Even easier, actually, is using the SmartBoard itself. After we got the SmartPen calibrated correctly it was quite enjoyable using the technology.

For a geography class, there were a couple of interesting videos that showed students dragging and dropping the names of US states onto the correct position of the map. This could be useful in any region of the world as well as for identifying geographic features likes lakes, mountain ranges, peninsula, etc.

It seems to be that this tool works best when kids can be in the driver seat. I didn't really see the advantages to my lesson or the ones online that simply featured a teacher lecturing. However, the tool seems to be most engaging when kids are interacting with the board themselves.

Maria Montessori: A Google Earth 'Bio' Tour

Below you should find the link to my Google Earth "Bio Tour" of Maria Montessori. For some reason, the audio kept cutting out at 2 minutes. After a couple different attempts at I kinda gave up.

Here is the information that I was unable to include in my audio portion of the tour, information is drawn heavily from Rita Kramer's 1976 work Maria Montessori: A Biography:

In 1913, Montessori arrived America, she was at the height of her fame and one of the most famous women in the world. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described her as "a women who revolutionized the educational system of the world-whose success has been so wonderful that the Montessori method has spread into nation after nation as far east as Korea, as far west as Honolulu and south to the Argentine Republic.

However, within 5 years Montessori would be all but forgotten in American, known only to a few professors of education.

She died in the Western Netherlands in 1951 at the age of 91.

Roughly a decade after her death, her methodologies would see a resurgence and today there are thousands of Montessori schools around the world.

Click Here 4 Maria Montessori: A Google Earth 'Bio' Tour