http://www.diigo.com/user/Sskrocki

Smartboard

So today, we are starting to talk about the smarboard in EDU350 I love the smartboard! i've seen it used in a classroom, in high school. It is really cool. It allows you to write on the board, and you are able to transform the writting into text. which is really cool so that way any student can write on the board, and you can transofrm the writting text, so it is more easily read by all the students. Another thing i relally like is being able to control the slide show from the board and you don't have to relay on a cliker ( whose batteries may die). or having to keep running over to a mouse to change a slide. you also can use your and to eraser or draw as long as there apporpriate eraser or marker is off of the tray. I am really excited to learn more about the software, using the smartboard, and more of what the software that comes with the program can do.

Copy right

So i learned somethings about copyrights the other week. 1st i learned that for a person it lasts your whole lifetime plus 70 years! a company it is forever!!! one cool thing i learned is that you don't need the copyright c. anything in a lasting from (books, cd, typed on a computer) is copyrighted which is really pretty cool. the tricky part with that is if you get it copyrighted (which can cost money),then you can say i worte (or whatever) this 5 years ago, before this thing came out. and you have proof.

Google books?

One of my other professors set up this lab session to help us learn and try to find information for a research prostpectus that we have to do. One thing i learned was that google has a lot books available for you to read. i knew that places like amazon.com had preview buttons so you can look at a few pages before you buy, but i didn't realize that google had done this. Most books you do have to pay for the view the whole thing, but its still pretty cool.
Another cool thing is google scholar. it is a way to narrow google's focus to be on scholarly websites and articles rather than sites that lay people update and put information on, which may or may not be true. While you still need to be carveul with where you get informatio from it is a great help in weeding out "bad" sites

Powerpoint slides can be so boring....not to mention filled with information. i was taguht "rules" of powerpoint in high school and have tried painstaknly at times to follow them. As a result i generally have a pretty good powerpoint presentation. However i have also seen some pretty bad powerpoints. One was at a confrence. the speaker had font that was too tiny to read from far away, and most of this speech was on the slide, it wasn't just highlights or important words, but information that could have been left out, and spoken to us.
Another thing i see pretty frequently at times is font colors that blend into the background, for what ever reason. usually i see this when people are using a photograph as a backgorund, and there is no color that won't blend in so they choose the color that blends in the least. A different picture could be chosen, or you could even stick to the same solid color background.
It takes some effort to make powerpoint slide...at least interesting, with making them interactive...hopefully this week we will learn ways to make them more interactive.

Movie Maker

Movie maker is a really good tool. It allows you to edit captured video, and edit it. You can really do a lot to the video. You can add titles, and transitions, and even credits. This would be cool to use in a classroom for students when doing a rerport, or group projct....i think my brother might have used this in high school when he had to do a group report on the a particular decades, he got the 80s.

curiosity

This week in the loads of extra time i have on my hands, by not being in class i decided to check out Twitter...and lets just so as of right now.. I'm not all that impressed. I will admit, i am on a bunch of social networking, and blogging sites. Some of them I have loved, and some i've stopped using because something new and better has come along. The main purpose of Twitter is to keep in contact by answering the question what are you doing? I've been on only for two days as of right now. But there is really nothing to do. You can send updates from your cell phone, but now most websites allow you to do that. there is not much to do, you can send messages to people, and update your status. Granted it does make it easier for people to quickly check up on their friends, and people that they are following because it is all displayed on one page, and it is displayed with the most recent activity on top. There are some applications, but honestly it looks more like the same thing, a widget, for you to add to websites. It looks like some of them depend on the browser you use, and the look you like. well this will take some more browsers and searching....one thing that would be helpful, a HELP page that does more that give you information on what Twitter is about, one that tells you where you can find applications. I just feel completely lost on that website..maybe after a few more days of searching i will find what i am looking for....but i don't have the time for that. Other social networking sites have been pretty easy to navigate and find exactly what i am looking for..

but we shall see... twitter is the one of the newer social networking sites, so things could change....we shall see where they go.