We were all able to meet on Tuesday, April 5th at 9:15 pm; it did take a little time because Angle was down, so Kenzie had a hard time finding us. During our discussion we discussed creating our project around iPads and decided that we would do something on how iPods change the game in the classroom. After thinking about it for a while, I thought that the topic was to general and did not know if we could accomplish making a professional development tutorial using this topic, but after more discussion, through email with our instructor and each other we decided to create a resource that shows educators different apps to teach the different content areas.
The technology that we have chosen to use is Audacity to record our sound; that way each of us can record a piece of the presentation, and PowerPoint to create the video. Audacity is a free, easy way to create a professional sound. We are also using Google Docs to create our timeline, storyboard, and to communicate, and Delicious to share our resources and research.
During our discussion we did discuss that Jesse’s interest is centered around science, Josh interest was language arts, Kenzie’s was elementary education, possibly a focus on math so all of the core areas are covered, and I said that since I have taught science, language arts and social studies I could focus on the social studies end of things. As of right now, we have only decided who is doing what subject, but have not decided who is going to put the final product together. We are meeting again on April 12th, so these things will be hashed out during this time.
As I said before, for our timeline we are using a Google Docs. We have a basic timeline created, and are continually adding to it. We did discuss that since I am going to be gone on a trip to D.C. with students from the night of April 26th until the morning of the 30th and will have limited or no internet connection, I would like to get the project finished, or at least my part finished by that time. Currently, we are all to be working on research on our agreed upon topic, so that when we meet on the 12th we can discuss our storyboard, and our next steps.
For our video conference we decided to use Skype. I checked into whether our discussion could be recorded using Skype, and it could not, do I emailed my group to see if any of them knew of any program for recording. In the end we ended up using Skype and recording with VodBurner and I also took screenshots using Smart Notebook; because that is what I had available while we were on vacation.
The video conference, over-all, went fairly well. It was a little difficult trying to do this while we were in Mackinaw and staying in a hotel, but it was sufficient. Our group had a difficult time coordinating and determining when our conference would take place; we first tried to come up with a time using our group’s discussion forum in Angel, but that was unsuccessful. In the end I called everyone and set it up that way.
After our meeting, I was trying to share the VodBurner recording with the other group members, but could not get it to load at the hotel, so I had to wait until I got home. When I finally had a fast enough connection I learned that the best way for me to share this recording was to upload it to YouTube and share the code to embed the video on our blogs. When I was able to get the video to work I was disappointed at the quality of the video. Because we had four people in on the conversation the image flickers between people when they are talking. The quality of the sound, while using VodBurner, was decent, but I probably would not use VodBurner with groups with more than two people. Jing would be the ideal tool for recording this, but with the free version only five minutes can be recorded at a time.
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