and more excel

I finally finished the interactive worksheet on excel. It really wasn't that difficult to master- excel is just very tedious. Many of the items on the rubric are too exacting (on several projects/assignments). Often times the hardest part of finishing assignments is meeting the rubric's exact guidelines. In some ways it is good because teaching guidelines are often very strict as well.

I was a little disappointed with the directions in our course packet. They focused too much on finishing this exact project and not enough on using excel in general. Learning how to use the software is always the most helpful part for me!

All in all, I was pleased with my final project. It might actually be able to be used in a classroom one day!

excel

I am really excited to begin learning how to use Excel. My dad asks me if I know how to use it anytime he tries to get me to organize anything. I'm not exaggerating. I'm pretty sure he has said the phrase "You know how to use Excel, right?" at least once a month since I was 12 or 13. He tried to teach me once, and I think I left more confused than when I started. Oh well.

I think Excel would be great to use when creating worksheets to be printed off or for use on the computer, like the interactive worksheet on compound words we created. I probably will never actually create an interactive worksheet for my students to do unless I have have a classroom set of computers. I would rather my students do a more interactive, research-based, or game-based assignment on the computer than a glorified worksheet. These interactive worksheets are just too similar to regular worksheets to be worth the trouble and precious computer time. (I say precious because I'm not holding my breath to have a full set of computers in my classroom.)

iMovie

Today was really fun in class. I have always been way too overwhelmed to use any of the really cool features on my macbook (iMovie, GarageBand, etc), so this class was really interesting for me because I realized that iMovie is really user-friendly. I'm so excited to use this to make movies about vacations and about events in life. I think that I will actually use this because it is so simple! I'm really glad we went over this in class.
I think this would be great to use in my classroom for parents' night to play a slideshow/movie of what the class has been doing. I think it would be really fun to have videos of fieldtrips and other class projects on my class website so that parents could see what their children are doing in school. I think I might have to find a way to encrypt or password protect the videos so strangers couldn't watch videos of other people's children... I would also have to get releases from the parents I'm sure to even take video/pictures.

Digital Scavenger Hunt

This Wednesday my curriculum team did a digital scavenger hunt of the first half of the alphabet. I really enjoyed getting to use some of the skills we practiced at the beginning of the week outside of the classroom. We got off to a rough start because our camera had a bad memory stick (we think); however, I did get to explore the resources upstairs, like the diecut machines. It was much more difficult than we thought to find creative pictures beginning with the letters A-L. I was surprised that we were able to finish the powerpoint in enough time after our technological setback at the beginning. I truly enjoyed this assignment and think it should be kept for future classes.