Week 4 of CEDO 540

This past week in class were were to learn about Bill Tancer.  Bill Tancer is general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence services company.  He studies Internet trends based on the searches that people do on the Internet.  One of the really interesting things that I learned was the pattern of when people start searching for prom dresses.  It turns out that January is actually the biggest months for prom dress searches.  Who knew?  The reason that information like that is important is because companies, either online or brick and mortar, can use that information to start marketing and selling the their prom dresses.  This technique can be use for countless other products.  This method of data research can be useful most of the time, but sometimes it does have errors.  Bill Tancer spoke about the excitement he got when he thought he could predict the winner of "Dancing with the Stars."  It turns out that the number of searches spiked for one of the contestants not because of her popularity on the show, but because of her attractiveness to men.  This caused  a false prediction that she would win the show, but she came in 3rd.  After learning more about Bill Tancer's data studying methods, I think it is very useful for companies that want to market something they are selling, but I wouldn't use it for trying to win bets on reality show contests!

Week 3 of CeDO 540

This week we had to make a survey that we could collect data on, analyze that data and eventually make a report.  When my group got together, we made a list of possible topics that we could make a survey on.  After discussing for a while, we came up with the idea of making a survey on pet ownership.  We felt that this would be a survey that could generate a lot of data because everyone can share their experience or lack of experience of owning a pet.  We are planning on sending this survey to many people on Facebook as well as on email.  We are hoping for a lot of good data that we can make a good report with.   I am very curious to see what numbers come out of this project!  

Week 2 of CeDO 540

For the past couple weeks we were investigating how to use mean, median and mode as well as learning about different surveys that are available for use.  Though I'm not thrilled about averages, I did learn a few new things the past few weeks.  I think it was useful to think about what numbers to look at depending on what topic your are talking about.  For example, for a group assignment we had to explain what group of numbers we would look at if we were assessing the value of our home.  It would be a good idea to take the mean for the most part because that tends to give an accurate number of where our home would be priced.  However, if there are a few homes that are on the higher or lower end of the spectrum, that can skew it a little.    When looking at surveys, our group felt you really need to have a pay per month plan if you were going to truly benefit from the survey site.  The free plans usually do not offer you as many questions to send out or have a limited number of surveys that you can send.   I felt it was really hard to say exactly which survey sites to use since there are so many of them, but Survey Monkey does seem like a popular and reliable service. 

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. 

Week 4 of CEDo 530

I found this week to be a lot of work yet very, very interesting.  It think this will be one of the weeks that I look back on and say "wow, I use a lot of that stuff now."  First of all, I spent a ton of time on my Pecha Kucha, but I really enjoy it.  It think this is a really great way to use Voice thread and keep yourself disciplined enough to not spend too much time on each slide you present to a group.  I am very happy with my presentation.  I did mine on baseball stadiums I have visited, so if you are interested in that topic, please take a look at mine.

The other topic we investigated this week that I really think is practical is Prezi website.  I am really serious about going back to all of my power point presentations that I have for my students' notes and changing them to Prezis.  It's amazing what a different presentation product can do for a presentation.  It's great to be able to zoom in on really important aspects of your presentation as well as being able to move all around to keep the audience engaged.   I'm hoping we can use this tool more during this cohort. 

Week 3 posting for Digital Story Telling

First of all, I would like to apologize for getting this posting up so late.  I was gone this weekend and was only able to get to work on the time frame I had on the airplane coming back from Boston.  Before I knew it I had to stow my computer away and couldn't get to my blog.  Anyway, to this point, my favorite activities of this past week has been revamping my powerpoint presentation and watching the example Pecha Kucha and thinking of what I will be able to do for my own later in this class.  As for my presentation, I think I really did some great things.  I made sure that I opened up some free space in my slides.  I also added a lot of contrasting text, to make it more visually appealing and to help my audience understand the main point of my presentation with out having to read a whole lot of text.  I took away bullet points that were once very prominent in my original presentation.  I also made sure that the slide backgrounds were not all the same and there were some unique slides put into the show.  Overall, I am happy with my presentation, but am open to any constructive criticism.  I still have to add some voice work to it, which I will do tomorrow evening.   As for Pecha Kucha, I am really looking forward to putting one of those presentations together.  I think I will be able to produce an interesting show, though I think it will take a lot of time and I may get frustrated.  I'm not going to let that stop me, I will make something really great.  Anyway, this week has been fun and I still have to look at the Animoto.  It seems like there are a lot of people who have done it already and have enjoyed it, so I look forward to getting at that.