Bubbleshare Slideshow of Saipan Flat Stanley

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Using Bubbleshare was incredibly easy! They are the same photos that I have used for my other projects but I hope that you enjoy the variety of presentation. The only recommendation that I would have is to have a SAVE option half way through uploading photos or when a session is cut short. This may be important only to me because I live on Saipan where it took 4 times to upload the photos because of unscheduled power outages.

My determination to get the photos loaded onto BubbleShare surprised even me! After the third time of waiting a couple of hours for pictures to load I was ready to turn to another slideshow presenter that I already had pictures on. However, when I saw BubbleShare on one elementary class weblog I really wanted one of my own! So maybe not determination but selfishness!

Most of the pictures are from Saipan Flat Stanley while in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I hope that the pictures will inspire you to begin a Flat Stanley project of your own. The students really enjoyed it. I have not had a chance to take the pictures and letters back in to the classroom yet because I have been plagued by a variety of illnesses. Yes, Mr.Murphy, bad luck, wrong zodiac sign, have been following me around the past couple of weeks. I hope to be able to make it back before the end of the school year. Make sure to look back to see how I presented the material to both 4 th grade classes.

Here is my online resume. I used Weebly to create this one. You can go directly to the site at Erin's resume to get a better look. I'll be honest and say that I did not take any real creative risks when it came to writing this resume. It looks pretty much like my paper resume just a little shorter. I like Weebly a lot and look forward to getting to know the ins and outs a little better. I think that it may be a good place to set up a classroom newsletter but I need to give it a try.

I think that for my next resume or online portfolio I will try Zunal's zportfolio. It is very friendly too but allows for more in depth material to be added. I think I could build it through Weebly but it may take a little longer. This is a good experience because it is completely relevant to what we need to be doing right now. I know that I need to start building my e-portfolio- getting units put together online and such- so that I am ready when I graduate next Christmas. This assignment lit a fire under my feet to get me going!

Well, for what it is worth here is my short video of Saipan Flat Stanley. You can watch the video here- Saipan Flat Stanley . I used Jumpcut to create the video. It is incredibly easy to upload and edit images there. You can even edit in Movie Maker first and then upload if you feel more comforatable. I added some audio but I think that it did not attach to my video. I will have to fix that later. I could not get the video to load here on Blogger but it is probably an easy fix once I spend some more time looking into it!

I enjoyed participating in the Flat Stanley project. The students that I worked with enjoyed it too. There were only 4 students out of 37 who had actually been to the United States. They were thrilled to get to know my mom and say that they know somebody in Arkansas. I like that it is easy to integrate into all disciplines and can be modified to fit any need a teacher may have.

I really wanted the students to get their Saipan Flat Stanleys back by the end of the year so I sent them to my mother in Arkansas. It worked out perfectly because for my practicum I was teaching the students about the South Central States and our Flat Stanley project made the learning a little more relevant.

Over the summer I hope to find some penpals to set up Flat Stanley project in my student teaching. Having the Flat Stanleys adds a creative element that the students are able to write about. I am amazed at all of the Flat Stanley resources on the internet. A teacher could probably base a year long theme on Flat Stanley!

Hope you enjoy the video. At the end there are a few photos of me with some students during our culminating event- party! It was difficult for me to leave these students. For the party one class wrote a play about my teaching and the other class performed a song. It was a wonderful experience. I had a fantastic mentor teacher and learned strategies that I will take with me to my future classroom.

Mobile Learning Teachback

You cannot click on the video links in the presentation below, please use one of the following links

SlideShare ppt presentation

or view on
Zoho

and then return to our classroom discussion board for some friendly feedback!

The past few weeks our ed tech class has been creating powerpoint presentations that teach a technology topic. The teachback that I created is about the future of mobile learning (also at Zoho). I honestly cannot say how much I learned about this topic because my knowledge before hand was extremely limited.My research just kept leading me to more and more about mobile technologies and their educational uses. You will probably find my presentation fairly elementary but I really had no idea that these are the possibilities that are out there right now and that they are realistic expectations.

In addition to learning about mobile learning I learned how to use a couple new websites for viewing powerpoint presentations. During my research I stumbled upon Zoho and found it extremely useful in preparing my powerpoint. During the day I get small bits of time that I can work on my research and even though I save all the sites to my del.icio.us account, once I finally made it home at night I would have to remember what I wanted to change or add to my powerpoint and then go to it again. Zoho is an online presentation creator (and much more!).I was able to work on and save my presentation anywhere and anytime. Just an FYI, you can invite people into a forum to chat while you present. Great resource!

The only problem that I had was when I uploaded most of the Powerpoint from my files to the website it changed the formatting a little- just enough to drive me crazy. So I had a choice to either redo the slides or go to SlideShare and upload for viewing. As you can see, I tried the easier of the two. I am glad that we had this project because I got experience the ease of both presentation sharing sites.

When you view my presentation you may wonder why I did not embed the video. Yes, it is easy to just follow the YouTube how to videos. My problem was that the video that I chose had a different URL code than most and I could not figure out how to tweak it and embed it.

As usual I should have been more organized when preparing. I need to figure out how to effectively use the internet resources available to me. I need to also find a way to show the variety of uses in a better way.

Overall I am extremely glad that I chose this topic to present because it has motivated me to try it out in the classroom. Lots of the mlearning sites offer help preparing grants and getting started implementing a mobile curriculum. From the research I found the mobile technologies improved on level learning only slightly. What was impressive is that it improved below level and at risk students significantly. With the diversity of our classrooms at an all time high mobile learning can help us individualize instruction and motivate the students to take control of their learning.