According to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers, one of my goals as a teacher is to engage in professional growth and leadership. As I follow all these RSS feeds about technology, I can't help but feel like I'm constantly engaging in professional growth. When I see something that interests me, I click on it. While at times this leads me to dead ends or useless information, I have been finding lots of great information and tools that I can use to help myself professionally.
My last post mentioned LiveBinders, a really useful tool for organizing information that teachers find for each area of their curriculum. But another thing LiveBinders is great for is their public binders. People have already created binders on a plethora of topics, and all I have to do is type in what I'm looking for and BAM! Suddenly there's a binder (or several) waiting for me. I typed in "Civil War" (which you might have noticed by now tends to be my topic of choice) and there were over 10 binders to look at, many of which had valuable and well-organized information that I could use when I teach that unit
Since I received my SMART Board last year, I've been trying to use it in an increasing variety of ways to engage my students. I've scanned in picture books, created a few simple games, and streamed some videos to enhance their learning. Most of the things I've done with my board, however, have not been created by me, but Animoto seems like a great solution.
I've always watched other people's videos and wondered how they created them. Short of using a video camera or PowerPoint, how have they made their videos so interesting? Animoto is a simple, user-friendly way to create videos for home or school, and I've learned that through watching others' videos, and easily creating my own.
Even the first educational Animoto video blew me away. It was a video about the Solar System created by a teacher who wanted to help her students review. At the same time though, it inspired me. It made me stop and think about my curriculum and how I could use it to help my students review info they'd already learned, or preview information they were going to learn. I've already decided to use Animoto to create videos about Westward Expansion and the Civil War for my students. The hardest part will be deciding what pictures to use, because it's really that easy to do. In fact, I've already experimented with Animoto by creating a video of a Halloween party I attended. Enjoy.
