Day 4 Reflection

I enjoyed today's training a lot. I thought that the digital storytelling project was really interesting and definitely something that I'll be excited to work with some of the teachers on. I had actually never heard of digital storytelling before, and I wasn't too excited based on what I assumed it would involve. Once it was explained and we started working on the projects, it became clear that it was a lot more flexible than what I was thinking of and it's definitely something that would be more exciting than a teacher lecturing or using a PowerPoint in front of the class. All the groups did a good job of coming up with interesting and diverse ideas about how to do their presentations and I thought that there was a lot of good feedback. I thought that people's feedback really helped to provide everyone with different ideas about how to make a presentation effective as well as different scenarios where they could be useful to teachers in different subjects.

Math Digital Story

Day 3 Reflection

I thought that today's training was especially interesting since I hadn't had the chance to use many of the tools that we learned about aside from the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. I do think that Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites can be very useful in a school setting, but I'm not counting on the teachers and school administrators being especially receptive to them initially. From my experience working in schools, a lot of people have a pretty narrow view of how students can use social networking, which is basically that students will just go on MySpace and post inappropriate things. I think that at least at first, getting teachers to start blogs would be received more enthusiastically.

I think that the open source software that we looked at (and open source software in general) is something that teachers will be really excited to use themselves and to have their students use. I know that teachers are always looking for new things that will keep students' attention and that they have to be pretty creative due to budget constraints, so it's a pretty perfect situation to be using open source software. I also think that the software we used to make tutorials was really easy to use and is something that will be really beneficial for me to use rather than having to give the same presentation/tutorial a bunch of times to different teachers. It's also good for the teachers to have a tutorial file to refer to since it will allow them to pause it, rewind, and generally follow along at their own speed.

How to download Open Office

30 Second Spot

Day 2 Reflection

The second day of training was very informative for me. Although the stuff we learned about Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calenders was mostly a review for me, it was a useful refresher and a good reminder for me that I need to make sure to stay organized from the beginning and not leave myself playing catch-up later on. I have used Google Earth before, but I didn't know about a lot of the features that we looked at today and I am definitely excited at the prospect of being able to show teachers how to use it and incorporate it into their classes.

I had used Microsoft Movie Maker before, but I still found the project that we worked on in the afternoon to be pretty challenging. We had problems with converting the video from the flip camera as well as other technical issues, but luckily we switched our focus to finding pictures, recording audio, and working on the transitions. I thought that we worked well as a team, and although we could definitely have used an extra hour or so, I thought the presentation came together well in the time that we had.

Day 1 Reflection

Today's training was mostly new for me. I've made a few entries on blogs that were already set up before, but I've never gone through all the steps to set up my own blog with a visual style and all that. I have listened to podcasts before, but until today the extent of my knowledge was basically how to subscribe and listen to them on iTunes. I'm not sure how much podcasting I'll be doing in the future since I prefer to write, but it was definitely interesting to learn and something that I could potentially use as part of the internship. For the rest of the week, I'm interested to learn some more skills (like podcasting) and to brainstorm more about how I'll be able to utilize the technological stuff in order to suppliment the classroom experience for students.

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About Me

My name is Ben Smith. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and moved to New Orleans eight years ago in order to attend Tulane. After getting my Bachelor's Degree in Sociology, I worked for a local nonprofit based at two elementary schools on the Westbank. Currently, I'm attending Xavier University of Louisiana and working on getting my Master's Degree in School Counseling. In my free time I enjoy going to concerts and festivals around town, traveling, and playing golf.

I am excited to be starting the TeachUp! internship, especially about getting back to working in a school environment. I'm not quite sure what to expect as far as the day-to-day work, but I think that building rapport with the teachers and administrators will be the main thing that I'll focus on initially. One potential challenge that I'm anticipating is figuring out how to work with people who are all at different levels of knowledge about the technology.