Computers in Education

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

War in Afghanistan Prezi

So, I've been introduced to the program Prezi! It's a lot of fun. Like Wordle, it's a great program for teachers to use to introduce a new topic, do a middle of a unit review of check point, or a reflection at the end of a unit! My kids have recently been working on learning about the Middle East. We focused a bit on Afghanistan and the war, but not the war the troops are fighting. We looked at the children that are there. The average age of people in Afghanistan is 17 (male and female). It is a country with a very young average population that has little educational resources. We looked at the environments and the resources that are available and how the children of Afghanistan risk many things to gain an education. If you are feeling reflective, check out the presentation and reflect on the questions yourself.

The War in Afghanistan Prezi

Chinese Video Projects

Well we all survived! I'm so proud of my students! They did such a great job through all the obsticals and technology headaches, standardized tests that got in the way which made us reschedule things and absences of group memebers. Such perserverance, patience, flexibility, problem solving, caring and effort was shown by my students.

Here is the link to my channel on YouTube where most of the videos are uploaded. There are two that have been place on their with audio-disabled due to copyright infringement.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eaddlema&aq=f

The project revolved around Ancient Chinese History. Each group had to make a 4-6 minute video on a topic they drew out of a hat including The Great Wall of China, The Silk Road, Marco Polo, Chinese inventions, The Terra-Cotta Soldiers and the Mongolian Invasion into China. They had to include 10 historical facts, no speaking, props and the video to music. Using digital cameras and movie maker, we were able to make this possible!

This was the first time I ever did a project like this before with my students and you can be rest assured that I WILL be doing it again! We had SOOOOOO much fun! There were definately groups that shined through as excellent, but most groups were able to get a good portion of the requirments finished. How they created the video was all up to them. I gave them what needed to be in there and the "how" was up to them!

I really recommend trying something like this with your classrooms. I think it something any age could accomplish. Granted, how much an adult will aid will decrease for older students and increase for elementary age such as holding the camera.

I had the students bring in their own cameras for this assignment. This is one area that was troublesome for myself and the students. Some of the camera were not compatable with the technology we possess. For example, the FLIPcameras that are ever increasing in popularity because of their resonably priced market, did not make it easy for us to edit using Movie Maker. We had to convert many of the group's footage to other types of files to make it work. Some camera would upload just fine, and some would upload the footage into QuickTime which is not compatable with Movie Maker. However, we made it through it all!

Here are a few that stood out as exceptional!