Webquest

Today I presented my webquest which was over exploration of spanish countries. The students were to choose a spanish speaking country and reseach it find information over family, culture, food, currency, etc. Then after they researched their country, they had to create a presentation over powerpoint or prezi with at least 10 slides. I also created a powerpoint over Cuba using the webquest link. It took me a lot longer than I thought it was going to, so I would give the students a longer time to work on it than I had originally planned. I made modifications on the webquest to make it exactly how I would want to use it in my classroom. The objective is for all students to develop cultural awareness through researching a variety of countries.

Pamphlets

As a group we researched gender differences with technology, copyright dates, what we can and can't take off the internet as educators and also about environment and exposure differences related to technology. I learned alot about each including that educators can take anything off the internet as long as it is for educational purposes, you give the author credit, and you don't use to much of the material. I also found out that boys have better fine motor skills because they play a lot of computer games while girls like to design websites and decorate. Also, there is a debate of weather girls or boys are better with technology but we came to the conclusion that it really has a lot to do with exposure to technology not so much gender. Also, we need to be careful about what we take from the internet because it is now all copyrighted for some time now. Then after we gathered all of our information and researched our given topic- we created a pamphlet that we can use to help others to have a better understanding of copyrights and cultural, gender and economic differences.

TED sixth sense technology

In this site called the Sixth Sense, A woman named Patty Maes deomonstrates over a screen what the capabilites of this new technology can do. I thought the video was facinating. You can take pictures with your hands, dial a telephone number with your hands, touch a book and find out the ratings and cheapest prices and do much more that they didn't have time to demonstrate or tell us about. The fact that it can do all these things is facinating, but in order to do these things you have to wear either tape, nail polish or marker caps of different colors is a little wierd to me. Also, another thing I don't like is that it is creating a lazy society. Instead of researching something, you can just touch it? I think our society is already becoming entitled so to have such easy access I don't believe is as much as a positive thing as the TED believers think it is. But the fact that technology has come this far is incredible and there are some really smart and creative people out there to be able to invent this.

Web Award Winners

The two web award winners that I found to be very interesting for myself were grooveshark and picnik. On grooveshark you are able to choose the songs you want to play and put them in an order that you choose for them to play in. They have all the latest songs and it is so easy to work. The second award winner is picnik. This is a site where you can upload your photos and edit them in very unique ways. You can put frames on the photos, stickers, text and change the colors throughout the photo. Very fun to play around with because I love editing my photos!

Tools of Technology

Technology has played a huge role as a college student. Obviously my laptop has had a huge impact on my use of technology. I use it for typing papers, researching the internet, music, photos, and I also use my webcam quite a bit. I also use my ipod alot which has access to the internet and other tools. I would like to learn more about how to use ipods and other attractive technology uses in my classroom. This would help me with my other classes for integrating technology

Virtual Tour

http://barcelona.arounder.com/en/park/park-guell/park-guell-01.html

Park- Guell I would show my classroom when we talk about spanish art. Gaudi is a very famous spanish artist and Park guell- along with Sagrada familia, casa de batllo, casa mila etc. are some of his most famous work. This tour of Park guell shows the entrance which leads to many other aspects of his crazy modern art.

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200604/alhambra/tour.htm

This virtual tour is of a part of La Alhambra in Granada Spain. This also fits into spanish culture but for Muslim art. It is a Moorish palace and it fits into Spanish history and the cultural art and how different parts of Spain were influenced by the muslim culture.