Week one of Cedo 540

On to another class!  This new class is a statistics class.  I don't recall ever taking a statistics class in the past, but a lot of what we were covering in the first class made sense to me.  Being a special education teacher, I look at numbers fairly often and look for patterns in students' performance to see where they may need a little more help or where they are excelling.  Something I learned this week was the concept of parameters vs. statistics.  Before this class, I thought statistics was the measure of a sample and a population.   I did not realize that you actually call a measure of a whole population a parameter.  Another thing that was new to me this week was skewed distributions.   I always thought that a positively skewed distribution was top heavy to the right, not the other way around.   Now I know that I was incorrect and I will understand what it means for data to be positively and negatively skewed in the future.  Though a lot of the material in this statistics class isn't a ton of fun, I do find much of it interesting and look forward to the rest of the class. 

Week 5 of Digital Story Telling

This week we were assigned to make a rubric  for a multimedia project we have used with our students.  This assignment worked out great because during the final week of school I had my Linguistics class make an Animoto project based on their favorite book they read during the school year.  When giving the students this project, I did not have a rubric for them to follow.   This assignment gave me an opportunity to make something that I can use multiple times next school year.  As I was thinking about what to include in this rubric, I thought about the main things I wanted my students to express in their Animoto.  I wanted them to show me they knew how to make an Animoto account.  I wanted to see pictures in their presentation that accurately represented the book they read.  They also need music that is appropriate for the mood of the book they wrote.  I also added a section on the presentation of the Animoto.  Overall, I think this assignment was very beneficial and I will be able to use this many times in the future.

Another thing we had to do this week was finish our Pecha Kucha presentation.  I did mine on baseball stadiums that I have visited.  It was a fun project, but was hard as I expected.  However, I did set up a routine to make the task not as daunting.   To make sure that each slide was 20 seconds, I used the stop watch on my phone to get an accurate count on each slide.  Before I knew it, I was producing quality voice overs.  I am very happy with my end product and hope others enjoy it. 

Finally this week, as a group we had to evaluate hardware multimedia.  Our task was too evaluate the Ipod Touch and Flip Video Cameras.  Both are unique gadgets that can be very useful in every day life.  It was interesting to really look at these products and see how they could benefit you.