My attempt at IMovie!

iMovie

This was my first attempt at Imovie! It was actually a lot easier than I expected. Sometime Mac programs intimidate me because I am afraid that I won't be able to figure it out. Imovie was a pleasant surprise. Out assignment was to make a movie with several pictures, captions and sound behind it. I decided to do a movie about my trip to Africa. It was a lot of fun finding the song to put with the pictures. I got the pictures from my camera and the music from Itunes. To get the pictures into the imovie you just hit the import pictures button and you can find pictures from the web or from somewhere else on your computer. The same applies to music. I just found it on Itunes and drug the song over my movie to where it was highlighted and that was all I had to do. All around a great project and it was a lot of fun to make!

EXCEL-LENT!

Well, this was the first excuse that I've had to use Excel. When I found out that we were using it was a bit intimidated because I always think of thousands of numbers and let's be honest, I am not great with numbers. 

When we started it turned out to be easier than I thought. We had step by step directions oh how to set up out spreadsheet. This spread sheet is interactive which means that the students type in the answers and it tells you if you got the answer right or wrong immediately. This is a new concept for testing. I think it's great because students get so use to the normal paper and pencil format for testing. I think this could be a great way to mix things up and motivate students a little more. 

One thing that I really like about this testing strategy is that you know right away if you got the answers right or wrong. This way, there are no surprises when the students get their grades back. It is more instant gratification. 

All around, I think this is a great way to involve the students in a new and exciting way!

Inspiration Project

Lesson Planning

Whew... Lesson planning was a whole different thing for me to try to figure out! Since I am not an Education major, I've never made a lesson plan before. This assignment was a little different for the Interpreters. We were asked to plan a lesson as if we were teaching a workshop to teachers about how to use interpreters correctly. There are several different parts to lesson planning such as the materials that you will need prior to the workshop and the resources that you will be using. This assignment was very difficult for me because I couldn't really get a good understanding on what the point of the workshop was. In my lesson plan I taught the teachers a lot of basic signs that they could use with their students and also basic conversational phrases. I feel that this really helps them connect with their deaf students and that they have abilities to communicate without the interpreter!

Google Docs

This was the first time that I've used Google Docs! I used it for my scavenger hunt presentation and it was very user friendly and fun to play around with! I found that the presentation part of Google Docs is very similar to powerpoint presentations which was helpful! After I signed into my Google account I typed in Google Docs and in the left corner I went to presentation. The format was already really familiar because the similarities of powerpoint. After I was finished with my presentation I hit the share button in the top right hand corner and hit the embed option. This provided me the HTML code that enabled me to put the slideshow on my blog!

I think Google Docs is a great resource to have because you can create many different presentation and documents and they are all saved under the same account! Teachers could use this to organize their worksheets and presentations! It's a great way to stay organized!

Scavenger Hunt

SCAVENGER HUNT DAY!! It's everyone's favorite? Why? You get to meet new people, get out of the classroom and be loud if you want! I think that a picture scavenger hunt is a great idea for younger students. They normally have a ton of pent up energy and would love to get up and move around. I think that other aspects about the activity are really important. I think that it encompasses problem solving skills because you have to talk through different questions that each person has. It also helps with social skills and learning to engage with other people! With a deaf child this would present very little issues. The interpreter would obviously have to go in the group with the child but this might also facilitate more conversation between the hearing and the deaf students.