Winding Up 31 May 2009

This is my last blog. (I think.) Today is the day I try to complete everything before the due date of 2 June 2009. I am unsure if I have 24 blogs, but I am pretty sure I did blog once a week.

As I am writing this, I am listening to the John Fishback Voice Thread. I did not find how to upload the Voice Thread on anything. I tried doing it through Google Documents. Like other things I tried using this service, my stuff is too big to use it. I had to edit down the two Power Points until there was under 10 MB to embed it into the Advanced Power Point. The final Power Point models don't do all the cool tricks I have in the originals, like voices without the little yellow speakers appearing, the music underneath the entire slide show, and the moving video. I may have to look into Google Videos, which appears at the top of a page too, but I can not use because I do not have administrative rights.

Any way back to embedding widgets, I did get both the John Fishback and the Abraham Lincoln pieces embedded after some problems with the copy/paste action. The Fishback one did not show up at first, but I kept trying. Lincoln was quick and done. They work and that is a good thing.

Widget wise I have embedded widgets in the Voice Thread/Podcast thing and the Advanced Power Point. They work. The ones I thought I embedded into the Classroom Wiki, just seem to be embedded links to other websites. I see the little screen on the edit page and the web address on the embedding page, but it does not work on the wiki page other than when I click on the link. I don't know how to get the URL to break down into code. So I will have the links as they are.

Thing I learned trying to get this final wiki project up are:
1) If you have already made your links for your pages on your wiki, don't click DELETE because you think that you are suppose to have the word VOICE THREAD on the link and not PODCAST. I could see the PODCAST page when I went to the Manage my wiki page, but I could not get it back where it needed to be.
2) Those headers from Flaming Text always seem to work on some computers and not all. The lovely red x appears and when clicked on, does nothing. Go back to the Flaming Text wed site and do you titles again. This time save them as picture files and copy/paste them. I had the same problem last year and perhaps if I ever need to use them again, I will remember this fact.
3) I make things that are too big to go on any of these sites. Google Docs couldn't hold my material. I had to edit down stuff to just give a taste. The Fischback material was edited by the students, so wasn't going to mess with their project, but it was too long. (Sort of like this blog...)
4) The students really liked to do the Voice Thread voice work. They liked hearing themselves. They were self critical and wanted perfection. One student who was negative when asked to write things, I had write a comment on his worksheet. He did find one thing he liked. I called him in with his special ed teacher. He watched other students do the process first. I showed him how the recording happened and demonstrated the use of the curser to draw on the image. He improvised his way through the one he had selected. Then he asked to go through the entire slide show so he could comment on other things. He sounded quite knowledgable. His problem was that he didn't like the sound of his own voice.
5) Keep playing with things and perhaps it will work. Trying to do some of these projects was sure frustrating...even if I think I followed directions...even if someone showed me, I forgot...but sometimes just taking a hunch and playing, I did figure stuff out by myself.
6) I am more competent and confident using technology. I will be using it more over the summer and throughout the next school year. I will be having the students using it more as well.