Online Learning Experience

I went to k12 online conference and watched a few of the sessions.

The first one I attended was Using E-Books to Motivate Pupils Writing.
The teacher uses an free myebook account to have students create there own e-books. He also uses easy speak microphones so the students can read there works out loud, which helps them determine if it is legible and correct, and then, he uploads these narrations to the e-book. He first talks about how to use the website to view e-books. Then he went on to talk about how to create your own e-book. This was interesting to me because I didn't know that you could create books online like this to be seen by the world. I think it is a great idea to display children's work. Students are motivated to work harder on the work if it is going to be published, and parents get excited about their children's work, and can easily view what their children have been working on in school. Also for myself who wishes to write and get my work seen. The website is really easy to use; I already have started creating an e-book.

The second session I attended was Using Web 2.0 Tools to Teach "The Outsiders."
In this video an IT teacher at a school was asked to teach some girls who were struggling with English about some 2.0 tools but enhance. He had to teach them about the book "The Outsiders" that they were reading in an English class using 2.0 tools. He used Stupeflix to create a video presentation about the book and then had the students create presentations themselves. The website takes pictures and automatically puts them into a video with cool effects. He also used We Tell Stories which sort of allows you to create your own story directed form a classic story. He used google maps to determine where one of the characters from "The Outsiders" could have ran to and what they would have seen along the way, then the students wrote stories based on the google map images. Using the google map images motivated the students who didn't like to write to write lengthy stories. All this was great to show that students that might be struggling in a certain are can be motivated if the teacher gets creative and uses different technologies to interest students.

The last session I attended was Digital Writers Workshop. In this session a woman elementary teacher talked about the writing workshop she conducted with her students. The goals of this workshop was to teach students to develop their own writing in a personal way, be creative, create stories as a group, and learn and use technology to tell and create stories. First the students had to develop and create their characters. They answered questions about their characters, created masks of these characters, and drew pictures of the characters. The teacher took digital pictures of the mask which were used later for their digital stories as well as the pictures. Then the students created 3D settings for the characters. They built the settings with stone, wood, and other objects, then they made some part of the setting electronic. Then the students created the plot of their stories using the Young Novelists Workbook. She then had the students storyboard their stories using Story Top. Then they created online books with their visual and written elements of the story using tikatok. Then they wrote and recorded a theme song for their stories using Microsoft Song Smith. Then they put their stories into a script format and recorded them as podcast. The last thing the students did was create a shadow puppet show with the podcasts playing with the whole thing video recorded. I am amazed by how many technological resources and different subject areas this teacher incorporated into a simple create a story assignment. By doing something like this teachers can make simple assignments in depth learning experiences that are interactive, fun, and teach many subjects. I also liked some of the technologies she used, although she didn't give addresses so I do not know where to find a few of them.