Betty’s Bytes

Bill Johnsen at the Department of Technology just reminded me of a cool Web application called a Voki — you see one on my page. Just click the play button to listen to her. If you look carefully, you will notice that the background scene is of a beach — actually the northend of Virginia Beach; so you can change the background of your Voki to any image that you own.

Imagine engaging students in learning by offering them the opportunity to create their own Voki’s, recording their assignments, and presenting them to the class! What a creative, easy, and fun use of technology! Demonstrating a math problem, presenting a history or science assignment, sharing a story… and the list goes on and on! Students will never realize how much they are actually learning as they enjoy the process of creating the end result!

Sometimes a fairy tale movie provides us with a moment of joy, an escape from reality, and hope for the future; August Rush is one of those feel-good movies that we all need to see.  It is about an orphaned prodigal composer who hears beautiful music in all of his surroundings and uses his gift to search for his parents. The music is wonderful, and the feeling at the end of the movie is one of love, joy, and hope for good things ahead.

At one point in the movie, a Fagan-like character Maxwell ‘Wizard’ Wallace played by Robin Williams, in response to August Rush’s question about why some people do not hear the music, replied that we do not all listen. Watch this movie, listen to the music, and hear the message.

I suppose this post has little to do with integrating technology in education, except that it reminded me that we need to listen for the music and offer hope to our students. We need to use any gift that we have — whether it be a musical gift, a creative mind, or a talent for using technology to make our lessons more engaging – in order to capture the attention of our students and create in them a joy for life, a love of learning, and a thirst for knowledge.

Capture screen shots and create step-by-step video instructions for your students to navigate their computers or the Internet or perform a task in Word or other software. It is easy with a free program from the Jing Project; all you need is a computer, Internet access and a microphone, if you wish to narrate your project.

View the Jing project on formatting text in edublogs for an example; this particular video is of benefit to students who are submitting projects to the writing initiative Do You Believe in Me? and is similar to formatting in Word.