This is my last official blog post for CEP-812. The course seemed to fly by. There are two major topics to be discussed: personal growth and goals.
Growth
I think that I grew the most on the assignment requiring the production of a podcast. I learned several new applications: Audacity, GarageBand, Lame, and FeedBurner. I enjoyed experimenting with Audacity and GarageBand (although I sounded pretty stiff voicing my script). I found the assignment frustrating when it came to getting the podcast linked to my blog; the tutorials didn’t seem to cover my particular hardware-software combinations. I think that I would have given up trying to link my podcast to my blog if it wasn’t for the support offered by Sue and Emily through the Q&A discussion board.
One of the things that limited my growth was a general lack of time. Things were coming due in rapid succession and I didn’t have time to go back and master what I had just learned, like the podcast. I would like to spend more time playing with Delicious. I don’t think I am using it very effectively. I was really excited about the SIG and had a great group. I think it turned out OK but we were envisioning something grander. We ran out of time due to fighting the Weebly interface and had to recreate several sections that disappeared during editing.
Goals Met and New Goals
I think that I have met many of my personal goals: learning to use my interactive whiteboard, my document camera, my sound system, and Jing. I have learned to use them but have not fully integrated them into my teaching. My students find it entertaining that I keep switching between my traditional white board, my interactive white board, and the document camera as I try to find the best way to present, and capture, content. I’m sure that these things will become second nature with practice.
I have set some new goals. For example, I need to discipline myself to work more with podcasts and Jing. I need to set aside time for these “productions” but not be too much of a perfectionist or I will end up spending too much time on bells and whistles and not enough time on developing good lessons. I won’t rehash the rest of my hardware, applications, and professional development goals here but direct the interested reader to the “Personal Technology Plan” portion of my website.
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Jeff,
ReplyDeleteI will also need to follow you on your quest to master "podcasting." I really enjoyed being able to listen to my voice, but it was very difficult to upload to my blog. Given these difficulties, I do not think I feel comfortable yet to have my students use podcasts
I am looking forward to the whole text-to-speech revolution. I would feel more comfortable just composing my text and having the computer read it than I do speaking it myself. It seems like a whole extra layer of work to create a script and then record it. It would be great if Blogger got around to hosting podcasts and eliminate the extra steps of posting.
ReplyDeleteMy kids get a kick out of me, when I bump the negative button on my doc camera or turn the focus nob by accident. All of a sudden, black turns to white on a worksheet. They think my hands look hysterical! For the podcasting some of the others in class found a resource called DivShare at http://www.divshare.com/ This resource allows you to store and link to the audio file. It inserts its own player into a blog. You can check it out in Tricia's blog (http://tlcarlson.blogspot.com/). It sounds like you are in need of some quality play time=8-) I'm planning on spending sometime playing around with Camtasia - Jings' big brother.
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