RILS Reflection

Looking back at the Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS) process I can see what was expected better than I could during the process.  I guess that might be true of anything, but when I am in a learning environment that is being graded I like more information instead of less.  I don't like having to figure things out when there is a grade on the line.  I prefer to have solid instructions so that I can complete the task using my own "checklist" type rubric against my progress. 

That being said, this project definitely opened my eyes to how I could have done this better.  I should have written down my plan to see the flaws instead of thinking I knew what I was doing after a couple of readings of the material.  I learned a lot in my own RILS from the struggles of my target audience, then learned again from reading other RILS on Educator Studio and commenting on them. 

What that says to me is that this assignment is set up to provide learning through experience which is often more valuable than just following a checklist.  Overall it was a valuable experience even though there were MANY frustrating technology challenges within Educator Studio and some instructional issues.  Fortunately, our instructor was always available to help and to work through the confusion.

PB7 Links to RILS Comments

Follow this link to my comments on a Social Networking RILS.  Below is an image of my iGoogle page with my Google Reader and Diigo gadgets on it.  These are the three Web 2.0 tools discussed in the RILS linked above.

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Follow this link to my comments on the UDUTU RILS for a great lesson building tool.  Below is an image of the UDUTU site. 

Final Project

Here is my Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario Lesson Plan and Video.  I hope you enjoy the video.  This assignment was quite an eye opener.  I learned as much if not more than my audience did.  The purpose was to introduce a new Web 2.0 tool, have them create something using it, interact with their fellow students, reflect on the experience and provide feedback. 

PE5 Wordle

New discoveries in Wordle!  The more I play with this application, the more I love it!  This time instead of just randomly trying different things, I started out by determining what information I wanted to put in the Wordle.  I decided to make a picture of April 1966 world events according to Wikipedia.  I chose that time frame because of the relevance it holds for me personally, being the best month and year ever (except those of my daughters).

Next I opened Wordle and went to the FAQs tab to see what other people were asking about the process of creating a Wordle and the limitations they've discovered.  This was very helpful, because one of the things I have been trying to figure out is how to save it in a picture format such as jpeg or giff.  Using the FAQs tab answered my question quickly.  It isn't possible.  It can be saved as a pdf file or once it is saved and opened in a window by itself a screen shot can be done of it. Wordles can be printed and then scanned which would also create a pdf document.

Another very helpful piece of information in the FAQs tab was how to include numbers in a Wordle by going into the Language tab and unchecking the "ignore numbers" selection.  This was especially important information for this particular design, since I wanted the year to show up in the design.
My biggest take-away from these practical experiences (PE4 and PE5) is that Wordle is easily self taught if one looks through all the available tabs.  Once completed Wordle also provides html code for copying the Wordle directly to a blog or website.  I am going to attempt to use that function this time when posting my Wordle here for you to see. 

I am really looking forward to seeing what my "virtual classroom" students discover in their Wordle experimentation.  Below is the April 1966 world events Wordle I designed.



Now here is the screen shot version, which is much clearer than the copy pasted html code version above:

Here is another example of a Wordle I created from Herman Cain's Presidential Campaign website.  This is his stance on Education:

Here is one of the President's view on Education:

PE4 Wordle

The assignment of creating a Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario (RILS) using a Web 2.0 tool of my choice is turning out to be interesting.  I don't have a workplace to incorporate this learning objective, so I created a "virtual learning environment" using a special Facebook page that I established just for this purpose.  I then invited my Facebook friends and family, and some previous co-workers to participate as my target audience. 

The tool I chose to teach about is Wordle.  I really love this tool and I believe it can be very helpful to anyone teaching any subject that wants to put words into a visual graphic to help stimulate learning.  The task of writing out the objective and instructions was not difficult, and getting the information to people was easy using Facebook and email.  I did some walk through of Wordle as I was writing the instructions to make sure I was explaining it well enough, so it will be interesting to see what feedback I get on that. 

Working in Wordle is very easy and it is just a matter of entering text into a text box and hitting the create button.  Then once the creation is on the screen changes can be made to font style, color, placement and background colors.  There is also a maximum allowed word count that can be changed from the default 150 words per design.  I've played around with the maximum word count quite a bit  so far.  More to follow in the next blog after I work on a few more tricks.

Below is my Wordle design of my daughter's eulogy to her best friend who died in an auto accident 3 August this year.  Taty spoke at her service and I wanted to do a tribute to Livi, so I imported the text from the speech she wrote and put it into Wordle to see how it would look as a picture.  It is remarkable, just like Livi was. 

BP6 Bryan's Music Blog

Here is a link to my comments on Bryan's music blog.  Check it out and see if you can solve his logo riddle.....

Blessings,

Cyndee

Bryan's Blog

BP5 Irving Peralta's Blog

Here is a link to my comments on Irving's blog about dual language learning in school.  Check out his blog, it is very interesting!

Blessings,

Cyndee

Irving's Blog

PE3 iMovie

Thank you for following my iMovie making progress.  Here is my final post on making this particular iMovie.  My movie is finished and I tried to upload it here, but it hasn't worked so far.  I am going to try again after writing this. I have saved my project in multiple formats in an attempt to figure out what is wrong and why it won't load and play on my site.  I may end of posting this, logging off, rebooting, and attempting to edit the post to add the video.  If I weren't being graded on the video being posted, I would just post a link for anyone wanting to view the final results.

The iMovie experience in this assignment has been fun, exciting, eye-opening, and rewarding. I learned a lot from the tutorials, so being required to watch them definitely paid off. I highly recommend iMovie and Lynda.com tutorials.  I am happy with my final movie and ready to get some feedback on it.  I look forward to your comments, suggestions, etc.  While you are waiting to see the movie loaded on this page, you can check out the vimeo version at the following link:

http://vimeo.com/30208104    

Just be prepared that you may not see the opening of the vimeo version of the movie.  It seems to be garbled for some reason.  The versions on my computer are fine, but something changes when I upload them onto this blog.  Happy Viewing.

PE2 iMovie

iMovie tutorials are finished and I am quite smart now.  Well, I am at least more informed.  Thankfully I can go back in and review the tutorials as I work through my project.  I have made some progress on my new movie creation, "A Day in the Life of an Athlete".  I decided to use some previously recorded videos of my daughter playing volleyball to create this first project. 

One new discovery I made while working on this movie is that with the movie trailer themes the soundtrack is pinned and can't be looped to add more of the same music beyond the original soundtrack.  I did, however figure out how to unpin it and move it around in the movie.  I also discovered that I wanted to put more clips and photos in a trailer than would fit with the music, so I grudgingly removed enough to make the visuals work within a reasonable time of the music playing.  

As my proficiency increases I will try more complicated editing techniques, but for now I have done some work with clip timing, text editing, music, the introduction and the credits.  I even managed to add a still photo and use the ken burns tool on it.  I am pretty happy with the progress I've made so far, and I look forward to finishing it and posting it on my final iMovie PE blog post.  Below are two screen shots;  one shot of my Lynda.com iMovie tutorial completion certificate, and the other of my project in progress. 

BP4 Wordle

Web 2.0 tools are my latest addiction.  That's right, I said addiction.  There are so many wonderful and helpful tools available, that I hardly know where to start.  There are the functional and organizing tools, the tracking tools, etc. 

Then there are the fun and artsy tools.  I decided to play around with the Wordle application after talking about it in our online classroom session in my Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture course with Full Sail University. 

I am currently in this course as part of my graduate curriculum and I really love the exploration of new tools portion of this course!  My life is so busy that without this course and the assignment requirements, I might never have taken the time to play around with the Web 2.0 tools that don't involve professional networking. 

Working in Wordle was super easy.  I opened the application and hit "create" to make my first ever Wordle design.  The big open text box prompted me to add some text.  I remembered that my instructor told us during the online session that Wordle made the size of the words by how many times they were repeated in the placed text.  That gave me an epiphany to see how my resume would look in a graphic representation.  Excited to see what would turn out, I copy and pasted everything on my resume excluding only my name and contact information and plugged it into the create box. 

The resume I was working with is five pages long and I wasn't sure if Wordle would accept that much text, but it did and the outcome was AWESOME!  Upon seeing the initial results, I then started playing around with the color and placement options until I had what I liked and then saved it and made a screen shot of it.  Check out my resume below:

MY RESUME

PE1_iMovie

Wow!  What a great investment of time watching 3 hrs and 28 minutes of iMovie 11' tutorials on Lynda.com!  I wish I had known and done this four months ago.  

I am now fully convinced to search Lynda.com before beginning any digital project.  Over the last few months I have created a few iMovies, and struggled through each of them.  

My first attempt was a late night request from my teenager to help her edit video she took in her Physics classroom to make a safety video.  Between the two of us it took about two hours to figure it all out and have a final product.  Looking back now, had I completed the Lynda.com tutorials on iMovie 11', that safety video would have taken us about 20 minutes to complete. 

Upon reading the assignment, I was a bit put off to think about watching 3 hours and 28 minutes of anything.  However, chunking it into smaller portions is the key to tackling this task.  

The information is so valuable, that I am now thankful this was a requirement for my current course. My first "aha" moment came during the toolbar tutorial.  I didn't know about the advanced tools available in the preferences setting.  More importantly, I didn't know I could select a section of video and click on the toolbar to place it in the project.  My most frustration creating the previously mentioned iMovies was trying to "drag" the selections into the project area. 

Hooray!  No more yelling at my computer over a silly function, now I have a better option in my bag of tricks.  

TOOLBAR

PROGRESSIVE LEARNING

BP3 Linkedin

Today's blog is about discovering Web 2.0 tools.  I am here to tell you, Web 2.0 tools are amazing!  While this may not be surprising to some of you, it is to me.  Each day as I discover new things through my Emergent Technologies in a Collaborative Culture course, I realize that I am not as technology integrated as I thought I was.  There are so many Web 2.0 tools out there that I could devote many hours to learning about them all, but then I wouldn't have time to work, eat, sleep, etc.  When I looked through the choices of tools at Go2Web20 at first I was amazed and then I quickly felt overwhelmed.  Fortunately during my search I discovered two tools I have been using for several months already.  One of those tools is Google docs which I like very much and highly recommend.

However, the tool I am most impressed with so far is Linkedin.  I discovered the Linkedin application through a friend a few months ago when I was transitioning from the military as a retiree.  Linkedin is the most recommended business networking application on the market today.  It is easy to use for creating an online profile to highlight oneself for employment and as a method of information networking.  I was able to create my profile including a complete resume in less than two hours and began networking right away.  I was even contacted by an employment recruiter shortly after completing my online profile.  One of my favorite features of Linkedin is the ability to connect to varied discussion groups to share knowledge.  I am a member of many discussion groups and have participated in some of them while learning about a lot of things through the automatic discussion thread feeds.  Similar to RSS I can choose to follow groups and have their discussions update directly to my email inbox.  It is an easy way to follow trends on topics that interest me.

I highly recommend checking out Linkedin!  Take a look at my screen shots below and at my profile if you like.  I appreciate all feedback as I am always looking for ways to improve my profile and increase my knowledge.  http://www.linkedin.com/pub/cyndee-taresh/30/a25/895

BP2 iGoogle PLE

The idea of a "one stop shop" for organizing my life is intriguing.  That is how I see the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) of my iGoogle page.  However, creating this place and organizing it is proving daunting.  I was just introduced to iGoogle this week and I am managing to meet the requirements of this practical exercise only because of the really well written instructions.  The step by step instructions are very helpful, especially having the required links provided in the same document.  Having 90% of what I needed in one place made creating my own PLE less stressful.  Ironically, it also shows how much time can be saved by using a PLE.  Once it is set up it is a great time saver for keeping my learning organized.  The instructions are like a mini iGoogle page.  They have almost everything I needed in one place.  I wonder if that was done deliberately as a way of providing an analogy to this assignment.  HMMMM.

As practical exercises go, this one if very effective for me.  I am really excited to have an iGoogle page set up and I am beginning to use it.  I have some ideas on how I want to set up additional tabs and gadgets I want to use.  So far the only drawback to this page is that some of my gadgets have embedded advertisement videos in them that are set on loop to play as soon as the page opens.  This is quite annoying and I am trying to figure out how to set it up so that it won't do that.  I am able to open each one individually and stop it from playing and looping, however, it doesn't save the choice, so the next time I open my page it starts all over again.  

Suggestions are welcome.  Check out the screen shots of the three tabs I have set up so far.  My boxes of links are organized left top to bottom (1,2,3,),  then right top to bottom (4,5,6).

The last screen shot is of one of my resource page gadgets.  It is an online grammar assistant, and so far it is phenomenal.  I am always worried about my grammar and this tool has every possible link I could ever need.  It even has help in podcast form, so I can read about the grammatically correct usage and then listen too.  Check it out, I am sure you will love using it. 

Blessings,
Cyndee