Comic Life

Here is a link to my Comic Life project on Native Americans.
This link provides a lesson plan as well as some assessment options that can be used.

Comic Life is such an amazing tool for students to use to show what they have learned about a certain topic.  Unfortunately, Comic Life is not available at my school and it is something that we do not have permission to download the trial version onto our computers either.  I was able to create a Comic Life Project from my home computer using  Social Studies and Language Arts standards.  I created my project on the six different Native American tribes we study in 4th grade. The following is what I included in my description write up for my Comic Life project on the lessons learned while creating the project.

Because of limitations and restrictions on our school computers, I was unable to use my students in this project. I wanted to use them and have them help me write the comic, but those limitations kept me from doing so. I decided to create the comic for an upcoming unit we will be studying in Social Studies. I learned many lessons about myself and learning online throughout this project.

I will honestly say I waited until the last minute to create this project. I usually do not wait until the last minute to do my work, but my teaching job has been very stressful this year and caused me to put less focus on my graduate school work. I began working on this on Saturday. I was quite surprised when I finished all the comics on Saturday and just had the write up to finish on Sunday. I worked all day Saturday and drew all of my pictures to use in the comics. I think I took the hard way out as far as drawing all of my pictures, but I wasn’t sure how to add my students’ faces into a picture with the background I needed for the Native American tribes. I learned that if I work hard, I can get my work done fairly quickly. I also learned, that I get very stressed out when I do wait until the last minute because I am so pressed for time. This is not good if something does not go right because it can cause me to turn the project in late.

I enjoy learning online. I thought the comic life project was fairly easy, which is great because I know that if we are ever able to get the program at our school, I will be able to use it with my students. The only problem I have with learning online is that I am not sure how to set up the wiki to post my project. I am hoping I will be able to do this successfully, so that my classmates can view my Comic Life project.

I hope you enjoy viewing my Comic Life project and if you see anything that I should change to make it better please let me know.

Reflections on PBL

Many of you reading this may wonder what does PBL stand for?  I, too, once wondered what in the world this was.  Going through school not too long ago, this was not something I had heard of.  Since teaching in Cobb County schools, I have heard more and more about PBL.  PBL stands for Project-Based Learning.  Many of the lessons the county has provided for teachers to use, that were made up by other teachers or people from the county, are project based lessons.  I have found through using PBL in my classroom that the students are more engaged in their learning.  They actually understand the material so much better because of the problems they solve while learning a certain skill.  PBL allows for students to apply concepts to real life.  This helps them to see the importance of the concepts and why they need to learn them.  Many students like working on projects instead of reading from a text book.  I am now realizing through the readings in this class how much technology can help with the PBL.  I have been using PBL in my classroom for 3 years, but have not always applied technology to the lessons.  This would add a whole other degree of interest and engagement for my students in the classroom.

Thoughts on the Blogging Experience So Far

I have learned many new things about blogging.  I use to keep a blog when I was in college, but used it more for my insights on certain topics.  I have enjoyed creating a blog for technology integration.  I have also learned things from my other classmates.  Blogging can be a great tool to use for collaboration and it provides an opportunity for people to show their personalities as well as inform others on the topic they are discussing in their blog.  There are many tools you can add to blogs to help others as well.  I enjoyed viewing my classmates' blogs and saw some things in theirs that I can change or use in my own blog.  So far this has been a GREAT experience! 

Successful Use of Technology

I had a very successful use with technology this week!  We had our Open House Wednesday night.  I had gone home sick earlier that day from school, so was not feeling that great when I came back for Open House.  For my Open House presentation, I decided to record my students saying the things I was going to present to the parents.  (I am not very good at speaking in front of adults and especially my parents.)  I recorded the students and took pictures of them.  I originally wanted to videotape them, but due to our computers getting re-imaged this summer, I do not have the software to upload the videos on my school laptop.  I created a PowerPoint presentation with the recordings that my students did as well as their picture on the page they were reading.  My parents LOVED it, and so did I especially since I was not feeling well at all!  I had many comments from the parents about the presentation and the use of technology in the presentation.  I even had one parent ask how my principal would feel if he had me come work for him to create presentations for his business!  It's times like these that it make it very worthwhile to learn the new ways to use technology and use them effectively in the classroom.  I do owe Dr. Baylen a huge thanks because I would not have thought to do this presentation if it wasn't for his Introduction to Multimedia class I took over the summer.