Students vs. Teachers in Technology

Upon completion of our "Green Group" project we came to the consensus that we, as teachers have all been exposed to new technological trends that will help us in the classroom. I felt this need as a teacher to be on the same, if not more advanced technological playing field with my students. If teachers can use the same technology that is popular amongst students and find connections using that technology to their curriculum then we are bound to be successful educators, right? This was my starting theory throughout our group project.
Our students are growing up in a much different world all around than the world we may have grown up in. A few of the people I coach soccer with put it like this; "We grew up grabbing a shopping cart or two, making them goals and just playing a pick up soccer game. Our students are growing up in a world where they plug in the "wii" get out the soccer mat and play virtual soccer in their living room." Will we ever catch up to the technological literacies of our students?
The answer is probably not!
After creating a homepage, a movie, a podcast and editing music I feel much more literate in my own skills. However these skills that I find so advanced are simply part of the recreational activities my students partake in. The younger generations to come will continue to have newer and more advanced technology. Therefore in the battle of students vs. teachers over technological literacy the students will most likely win.
What I have taken from this experience is the fact that because our students are growing up and being educated in this type of world we must use technology to better educate them. We can use a sound editing program to create a variation and teach them to do the same, much like studio producers and musicians and believe me this is different from arranging by rote and on staff paper.
I believe concepts are better absorbed because technology allows instant gratification in the elements we are trying to learn.

"Smile" Your on YouTube

I am now an official member of youtube.com. This means that I can post my own movies for the viewing purposes of the "general" public. I was actually quite hesitant to post my movie on youtube.com because it is my first attempt and I'm still not sure if it is youtube worthy. I am also a bit weary of having some of my anonymity be discovered by viewers. Regardless it is quite an easy process to actually become of member of youtube and be able to post your videos. The purpose for our class was to post our videos on youtube and then use the youtube link to create our own podcasts. If someone had spoken that sentence to me a month ago my response would have been "wait, what"! In exploring youtube post my membership I decided to search for my movie. I typed in "Sailing" and to my surprise hundreds of movies with the same topic popped up. In order to access my video I realized I would have to type in the entire name or as much information about the title as possible so the explorer could locate it. Youtube has allowed so many "future" movie makers to create "rough drafts" of what could someday be muti-million dollar pictures!

Surprising Reactions

When I entered this course two weeks ago I truly felt like I was one of the reasons they write the "Computer's for Dummies" books. Everything was challenging and a bit confusing and if I couldn't figure a command out in creating my web page I would just throw in the towel and wait till class the next day.
Things have changed quite a bit in a mere two weeks!
While editing some of my pages this weekend I realized how much quicker I move compared to when I was first constructing the page. I also have taken initiative to educate myself on commands or procedures with sound editing and image editing that I am not familiar with. I've learned there is a web/instructions page for almost everything!
I am really quite proud of myself for two reasons. First, I have started my movie about Sailing this weekend. That may not sound like such a major thing. However I have started my movie using "Movie Maker" on Windows without any instruction from my class. The lesson on "movie maker" is tomorrow! I took it upon myself to open up the program, read how to edit images and thumbnails and put in transition filters between images. I say this honestly, two weeks ago I would not have taken on this task.
The second reason I am proud of myself is because of my Dad's reaction to my website. Let me preface this by saying that my father who is a writer used a type writer up until about 10 years ago and even now he still types with one finger on each hand! Regardless when I showed him my homepage in all of it's grandeur he simply said, "Wow, I didn't know you could do all that. It's pretty cool!"
To myself I thought the same thing!

Acrobatic Swan Lake (Group Process Project)

Yesterday in our group discussion we took a look, through "youtube" at a dance group performing the ballet "Swan Lake". This was no ordinary dance group. The type of skill required in some of the acrobatic movements these performers were displaying was unreal. After watching this performance our Tech Resources group decided to use the video and music for our project. This decision came after we began to fiddle with the sound of "Swan Lake" in the sound editing program called "Audacity". After speeding up the sound source then playing with the existing youtube video we began to see how we might use an activity like this in a lesson on music or video editing. As a group we decided to each edit some of the sound clip for the video we saw of "Swan Lake" and then compare tomorrow. Because we want our project to inclue a lesson plan that might be possible to use in our classrooms we thought that if we used a few different edited versions of one song then perhaps we could dicuss the differences and similarities in the new editions with our classroom. Some discussion topics might be: what is different about an edited version from the original, is it still the same piece of music after editing? what effects do the edited versions have on the video and why?
These are just some of the ideas we have been brainstorming in our past few group meetings.
The plan for today is to begin creating a powerpoint as well as asking ourselves some of the above questions with the music we edited last night.
The next step is to figure out how to edit a "youtube" video in order to produce similar effects to the music editing.

What's So Difficult About Creating an Animation?

In our class yesterday we used our "processed images" to create the beginnings of a movie, better known as animations. I thought I had some great images that I had tweaked and processed through a program called foto flexer. For example I took a real life image of a flower and turned it into a cartoon. Then I took a picture of me from a trip to Jamaica and created a blue print of me drinking a beer. I also altered a picture of "real life" cabs rushing down the street in NYC to become a painting-like vibrant illustration.
Of course when we began constructing our animations yesterday I was so excited to see all of my "different" (being the key word) images become a movie.
I completed all the steps, transforming each image into a "gif" file and changing the speed of the picture so that the change from image to image would occur slower.
When I finished all of the leg work and finally played my movie I was shocked to find out that all of my pictures, rather than looking like an evolving movie, just piled on top of one another to look like a giant mess!
The step I missed somewhere along the line was this: THE PICTURES HAVE TO BE THE SAME SIZE AND SHOULD BE ALTERED IMAGES OF THE SAME PHOTO!. This was a key factor into why my first animation did not work. I felt a bit silly afterwords. If you think back to those "flip books" that when you turned the pages really fast the images on the pages of the book moved and looked like an animation. Why did this work? Because the images were all the same except for minute and minor alterations with each page.
Because this is an educational setting and not a professional movie making studio I posted "My First Animation Attempt" on my homepage with this link to help anyone who may have experienced the same mistake.
You can check out my new and improved "Cab Movie" otherwise known as "My Second Attempt at Animation" at the link below!

Dance, Music, Technology and Education

How does one combine dance, music and technology in a presentation about education? This was the first question we asked ourselves when our group for this class met. There are four of us in the group, three are music ed. majors, one is a dance major and all four of us are education master's students. We have learned how a number of computer techniques and processes thus far that could aid us in combining dance, music and education. By now it seems fairly simple to cut up the sound of a piece of music or take pictures from a dance and create an animation. The trick would be finding a link between these activities and how we could incorporate our classrooms in an educational, school setting. We came up with this scenario and approach to our project. First we will use power point to display all of our findings and lessons in presentation. Our topic will be combining a dance with one piece of music, still to be determined. With the help of technology we will speed up or slow down the music and still use the same dance then vice verse we will take the pictures and animations created from the dance and speed them up or slow them down as the music remains constant. Interjected in this process will be ideas that could build up to a lesson plan. For example questions we could pose to our students as we use technology to do the fore mentioned things. Perhaps a question would be, "If we speed up the tempo, electronically, of the music is it still the same piece of music? Why or Why not?"
In a world that is driven by technology and where our students will probably know more about sound editing and animation programs we as teachers need to incorporate using this technology into our lessons. Technology in this sense can help us achieve what we deem important in our subject areas to know.
Our project strives to go through the process of teaching through technology in our classrooms.

Light Bulb Moment!

I have been a computer architect for the past few days, constructing my website and adding different links and pages to accent it. By the day I am becoming more and more to be my definition of computer literate. However, I would not have attained all of this website success with out my "light bulb" moment. It came to me during class last week, although I didn't realize it until Thursday night when trying to create my "bio html".
Do the terms "cut and paste" ring a bell? Such a simple process really that I was not making use of while constructing additional pages to my homepage.
I was killing myself trying to go back and forth between the instructions web page and my own editing. Then it hit me, like a "light bulb"! I didn't have to work in this way to try to make myself remember how to add on a music link or a picture link or even a center command. "Cut and paste" was the answer!
It's really such a simple tool, but for those of us on our way to becoming computer literate it is so easy to overlook.
With "cut and paste" tactic I have been able to construct pages in minutes and at lightning speed.
The easiest way to become computer literate may just be right under my fingers!