The Finish Line is In Sight

Well, we've almost reached our final destination so I thought it would be nice if I wrote a semifinal blog entry. Over the course of this summer I think I have learned an immense amount of information that will be very useful for when I go out into the teaching world. This class has proved to be especially useful because I've been able to spend so much time working with technologies that will be faced daily in my life as a teacher. I would have to say that my favorite activity was making the iMovie. Following that, I would say that using google docs will be very helpful in my future as both a student and a teacher. Activities and lessons are always much easier to plan with others when you can work collaboratively on the same project and see constant updates as to what's happening in the lesson.

Hopefully I will be able to continue to grow in my amount of resources for the future, especially in my knowledge of current technologies and I would like to continue learning new things every day for the rest of my career. :)

iMovie Extravaganza!

We've spent the last two classes working on our iMovies and I have to admit, I've had a really fun time working on these. I think video making equipment has always been pretty easy for me to use, and I'd really like to use iMovie again in the future to create more movies for personal and educational purposes. My iMovie I made for IT486 includes a group of pictures I took on my trip to Ireland my freshman year of college. I traveled there with the Pride of the Southland Marching Band in order to march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Dublin. It was a wonderful experience and I would really like to go back to Ireland one day. It's nice that I was able to do this project in 486 because I think I'm really going to be able to enjoy this video and remember all the fun times I had in Ireland that year.




I think iMovie will prove to be especially useful in the field of music education because you can easily use it to create videos which demonstrate instrument holding, posture, and other aspects of playing a musical instrument. And seeing as how audio is a big part of iMovie, it will be good that the kids will be able to see and hear different examples of playing and instruments.

I've created movies before using iMovie, but when I created them I was using the camera built into my computer to record live events. Here's a link to one of my videos. Yes, it is terrible playing, but this was a video taken in the process of myself learning to play the trombone. (definitely not my best instrument!) :) And that's also why the camera is not pointed at my face...I'm fairly ashamed of how bad it sounds, but I guess I shouldn't expect too much when I'd only been playing the trombone for about a week! I've done a number of movies using iMovie before to turn in for playing tests, but I've never used iMovie in the way I used it for this class before.