Inspiration

Inspiration is an online tool that is used to create different charts, diagrams and graphic organizers. Our project was to create a graphic organizer that could be used in our discipline based off of a text book. What went well is that the program is very user friendly. As a person who likes to just click around and explore, I found that everything I was looking for was easy to find. One thing I did not like was that after changing the background color, the tags on the connecting arrows still had a white background. I guess this could be beneficial to the students to have it stand out but I found it to be more of a distraction from the larger topics at hand. I also found it really hard to type mathematics equations because there was no math typer. This makes equations really hard to read. Aside from that, I liked the program a lot. If I were to redo this project, I would open it up so that students have freedom outside of their discipline. I feel as if mathematics isn't necessarily the best subject for a graphic organizer of this type because so many times you need to show examples or steps of how to solve a problem. I found it very difficult to be thorough without using too many words. I think Inspiration is a great tool which should be utilized in the classroom in many ways. You could use it to have students create a web about themselves in order to get to know them, use it as a creative way to display classroom rules or even have students create their own. Students could create an Inspiration project on the history of a mathematician, definitions associated with different topics or even to link practical applications with different topics (which seems to be a huge problem that many students believe exists in mathematics-no practical applications. They're wrong, however, so having them web out the applications might be very beneficial for the students). Overall, I like Inspiration and can see myself using it in the classroom.

Savenger Hunt

For this project we were required to take pictures of things around campus that fulfilled different requirements. Our project is presented in both a Picasa web album and a Google Presentation, both of which can be found below!

Picasa:

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Google Presentation:



Using both Picasa Web Albums and Google Presentations were really neat. I thought Picasa was really easy to use and thoroughly enjoyed working with it. The interface was very user friendly. I thought it was great that you could switch from photo to photo and it would save your information without physically clicking "save" (which is great for people like me who tend to forget to save their work). Picasa also allows you to edit your photos by adjusting the exposure, contrast and color settings as well as adding pictures and clip art to them. This allows the user to personalize all of their photos in their slideshow. There isn't really anything I would change with Picasa.

Google Presentations was also cool to work with. Essentially, I thought it was like working with an online version of Power Point. Uploading photos was simple and they were automatically placed in the center of the slide. You could also edit the colors, text size and font, pictures, etc. to truly personalize each slide. It's also nice because the presentation is already online and the user doesn't have to worry about emailing presentations to themselves, losing formatting preferences, etc. that could create problems. Therefore, I think Google Presentation is very useful and helpful.

The only thing that was slightly confusing about both of these was how to embed them into the blog. I believe that taking a course in high school on html code has helped me not be completely overwhelmed when embedding my slideshow codes. However, I can imagine this would be difficult for someone who hasn't taken a class.

I believe both Picasa and Google Presentations are very useful in the classroom. Students can create slideshows as a visual aid for presentations, displaying material, etc. By using an online resource, students don't have to worry about formatting changes or forgetting a flashdrive or any of the other common mishaps that abound during presentation week. Teachers can also use these in the same manner when going over material, introducing themselves to the class, or other various occasions that call for slide shows.