PE4_Poll Everywhere

Hi. Thank you very much for following my journey via blog, in my quest to help improve education in America. My instructor this month is incredible and has given us projects that are inspiring me to new heights. I am of course becoming proficiently savvy at ‘Poll Everywhere.’ It is one of those mandatory Web 2.0 Tools you must try. You will laugh that you hadn’t used it earlier. In fact, I owe a big favor to my friend who introduced me to this gem. If you want students to be involved with creation of content, this program allows them to offer answers, questions, and comments through polling remotely. I have now given students the chance to send me all three of these and they literally glowed with high engagement. They felt their voice was going into the history books! The program incorporates a technology they are familiar with and gives every student a voice in class.

I am nearly instantaneous with the general features of the program now and I am ready to venture into some advanced features. The moderate features are the ability to archive the input that students send in. I also really like the ability to show students the percentages of responses per multiple-choice answer. It works best when you don’t show them the responses until time is up for them to input. Otherwise someone just wants to be funny and submit a significantly wrong answer. That actually is nice for them to be rebellious in a cost-free way. We are actually offering therapy for students by using this program! Hey, if you feel grumpy today, go ahead and put in the wrong answer, because I am here for you. I’m in their corner, if you know what I mean.

An intermediate level feature I am mastering is the Tweets and Private Links options.

I also just used this Powerpoint download function and will give you the results next post. I have to keep you coming back for more!

The programmers are obviously well connected to the important needs of their users. They have keen insights to offer these additional perks. They are starting to make me want to upgrade my free account and submit a budget request with my administrators. I will keep you updated with my results and advanced mastery!

BP7_One Minute Video

Welcome,

Here is a brief video explaining the powerful Web 2.0 Tool, Poll Everywhere. Enjoy

BP6_Link to 'Blog this!'

Please follow this link to my comments on Kimberly's blog about the organizational power of the Web 2.0 tool, 'TrackClass.'

BP5_Link to Learning Through Doing: New Approaches to Education

Please follow this link to my comments on Jessica's blog and iMovie video.

Be sure to watch her video that looks like this photo:

BP4 – Polleverywhere

(All photos from www.polleverwhere.com)

My current project is focused on student engagement and the goal is to increase student immersion and significantly develop student-generated content. A strong Web 2.0 tool to help these outcomes is Polleverywhere.com.

Any educator can go to the Polleverywhere.com site and start a poll without having to sign up and give out the names of their children AND their social security number. There is a simple free account that is powerful, yet limited to 30 students that can respond for each question. Hey, thirty and Free is great for the average classroom of America in this economy. So the beauty of this tool is that an educator can ask open ended questions, multiple choice, true/false, numeric answers, etc… and the students only need to have a cell phone or computer to respond. All of my college students had cell phones each time I have used this tool.

 The day I implemented this in class with my first question, I instantly had 100% of the class scurrying for their cell phones to get involved. I could see the look in students’ eyes thinking, “Wow, a teacher that lets me used my banned cell phone during class time. This teacher is crazy – hey, actually cool… Whoa, they tricked me into answering in class! (tee hee, snicker snicker)” – because they liked it! Technology in the classroom will save us!

 Every college student in my room became engaged because they had a chance to be anonymous and provide input to the content of the class. Their answers were like “Gold” to me. Every answer was great, even though some were incorrect. I just said, “This is an enthusiastic answer, yet it could be improved a bit by changing the letters, Y. E. S. into N. O. to be a bit closer to the correct answer,” and the students chuckled. I rarely asked yes/no questions with this tool. That was mundane to students. I instantly found out that they wanted to really use their brains; they wanted to offer intellectual input like, ‘what a good essay question would be for today’s subject?’ Wow, the students wrote the test questions. That gets 100% student engagement – especially when I told them, they truly, for real, were writing the exam!

 There were a couple questions that I required students to add their name in the text message they sent to the poll. Most answers were anonymous and students remained professional every session I’ve used this tool. That may be because respect exudes from my room. It is the most important thing I convey in my teaching and I never say it out loud. It just happens. That may be a tough issue for some teachers though. If that wasn’t the case, students could anonymously enter negative comments and ruin the moment. A teacher always has the ability to pre-screen the answers before projecting them.

I am extremely impressed by Polleverywhere.com and am now considering submitting a budget request to upgrade to allow the higher answer quantity for my classes. Students often want to input two or three comments, answers, or questions for a single poll proposition. Hey, I want to get those student brains thinking and let them take over my class with no limitations! Polleverywhere.com is one way to do that, but please don’t tell anyone else, because these Web 2.0 tools are really supposed to be a highly kept secret! Right?

PE3_iMovie

Yeah! I have completed my iMovie 11 training on Lynda.com and I have a few more highlights to share from my learning experience. The ‘Trailer’ feature is incredible and very easy for the novice editor – ok any editor! It offers drag and drop clips into boxes and wow, the entire video looks nice. Like adding water to a compressed dry sponge and then boom it expands to full form in five seconds before your eyes. Here is my sample video for proof:

 In further training, I learned that you could drag background music into an empty area of the project pane. That sound or music can be locked to a clip by clicking on the background music and sliding it left or right and a pin shows up in the upper left of the music window. When you release the clip, the picture and sound are pinned together.

Another feature is that you can drag just audio from an event clip by holding down the shift key and command key, then drag that clip to the location desired in the project window. I also really like the audio waveform view feature. Hitting the bright blue button shown on the bottom of the next picture turns this on. The light blue waves under the video are the audio volume levels. It tells the editor the general volume level of the audio so smooth balance can be set among clips.

Finally, I learned about beat marking which is a wonderful feature for music video editors. It is a simple way to add pictures or video that change on the syncopated beat of a song – or however the editor choses.

What a valuable tool iMovie 11 has proven to be for educators and the world. I certainly hope educators have a mandate to create a video this year. No video – No teach. Here is my iMovie Training Certificate!

Seriously, with tools this easy and powerful, every educator needs to get into the game. Students need this. What do you think?

PE2_iMovie

Now I’m chuckling from learning even more functions from this gem of a program. iMovie developers not only offer the orange bottom bar for clips used, there is also a top green bar for favorite marked footage and a top red bar for rejected footage. The editor scrolls through and selects these while viewing and marks them so later compositing is significantly easier and timelier.

Tagging now has new meaning to me. A blue bar in a clip signifies it fits into one or more identifier categories. The people finder function can detect presence of people in video clips and marks that clip with a purple bar.  Now my shoulders are moving up and down from laughter that someone has invented moving video facial recognition. We need to get into our computers: See, I did!

 iMovie has the capabilities to do everything I never thought could happen. Green screen, cropping, colorization effects, anything you want is easily at your fingertips after these training videos. I used to actually scrub edit S-video tapes in the 90’s! Now you know why I’m laughing in joy from learning this program. Call me later if you need an explanation.

The most important thing I have learned from viewing the iMovie training videos is the power of creativity. I had learned to edit video on five other traditional programs. When I first saw iMovie 11, I pre-judged it because I didn’t know it. Wow, is that the number one problem in the world or what? After seeing this fresh new approach to video editing, I may leave all the other programs I’ve used in the past. I haven’t seen any functions that iMovie can’t do. What a powerful creative team from Apple. I am entirely impressed and sold now. Thank you to my instructor who initiated this project and to Lynda.com for the training. Thank you Apple for giving the world such an amazing program!