Reflection

I believe my favorite tools are the ones that allow me to manipulate images and videos. I am looking forward to assign my students with a photo story so they could add a free narrative about the events they are shown and let them work in pairs so they could share their work at the end with the rest of the class.

My expectations have been already transformed for this new upcoming school year. The learning process is changing all around the world via multimedia and, as a part of this global structure, we have the obligation to update ourselves and become better digital citizens of this nowadays small world so called home.

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I would love that my students understand that not every single thing they find in the web is exactly true.

We all have the obligation to share our technological knowledge to construct a better digitalized society.

Be cautious with the content they find on the web especially when it comes from unfamiliar sources.

I would like to transmit to my class that just like any citizen has got the right to go to school and learn to read, write, add and multiply ordinarily. There is also a different way to acquire knowledge and a new fashion to interact with innovating devices to accomplish it. I’d like to state that such new era comes with its own challenges for our society including ethics, security and obligations.

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Wireless technology has taken over and life without devices such as Bluetooth is simply unthinkable nowadays. The multimedia era provides us with such mobility hardly ever imagine before. Mobile touchscreen technology gives us the opportunity to mainly focus on our students instead of concentrating our attention on the interactive board. The diversity of apps, that are offered online, opens our horizon of possibilities to include dictionaries, thesaurus, newspapers, e-books, biographies, etc…into the learning process so our students find handy as many available resources as they can get to better perform their academic assignments.

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Screencast allows us to store images so our kids may narrate a photo story, not only fun to do but actually acting out the stories, by incorporating their voices, including different tones of voice, variable verbal fluency, whispering, etc… mean the dissection of the characters from deep inside that would assure the fully understanding of their features which would enable our students to make inferences and drawing conclusions a much more easily process.

Coincidentally, I happen to have several friends that either teach in elementary or middle schools down in Mexico City. That makes me wonder the possibilities that we have in our hands to connect our students with the rest of the world in real time. I am sure that we can interact with other classrooms in a different country and learn from them at the same time; not only their language but their culture in general: customs, traditions and holidays.

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Including videos into the learning process represents such a very powerful tool in this more becoming teledirected instruction; television simple makes things to come alive, in real time if necessary, so the children have a positive reinforcement of topics, previously discussed in class, that illustrate such diversity of themes.

Kids seem to be more involved into the matter of study when it is represented by images in a coherent sequence; they also seem to abstract and better develop such themes when they are prompted to respond to what they are being exposed to.

I posted two videos that may be useful in a 3rd grade class. The first one is about a guy that trekked across the Amazonas River for two and half years, those images provide us, as educational leaders in our classrooms, with the opportunity to explain concepts such as landforms, maps, exploration, tropical life structures, etc…The second one is about Martin Luther King Jr. and it can be used to introduce one of the greatest American heroes and the importance of our civil rights and obligations as citizens.

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Digital stories are indeed fun! Our students will definitely be captivated by the magic and visual power of images of themselves and personal environment. The best thing of all is the opportunity that we have to provide a meaning to those images either by sequencing them, in order to fit them into a photo story or developing a narrative out of it. Possibilities are as limited as our imagination, I clearly see the usage of this tool to document classroom experiments, represent life cycles, record field trips and even to create a class photo album.

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A wiki web site may be used in endless different ways in and out the classroom; we, as educators, set up the limits or expand the frontiers of learning. A wiki may become a simple articulated list, a family budget, a collage of images or thoughts, a social writing workshop, etc… you name it, I mean the possibilities are just right there in front of our eyes to try the known and unknown in the effort of constructing a new scaffolding of ideas, procedures and tools in this more and more teledirected society.

Teachers may find useful a wiki web to work on a lesson plan in and out the campus at any convenient time.