Tuesday, September 23, 2008

SMARTBoard


Today we started planning lessons using a SmartBoard. I chose to start teaching about the Grand Staff, how to draw a treble clef and bass clef, and how to remember the notes on each staff. The interactive part involved drawing the clefs on the board. I wish the SmartBoard could handle more pens at once, because it could take a while for all the students to try on the board. I suppose, however, that they could follow the directions on the board and try on their own paper, and then I could pick a couple students to show their work.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Editing bad PowerPoints in class: enjoying each other's stress

WELL. I would just like to say that I thoroughly enjoy editing things. I love proofreading and I love fixing presentations to look nice. Starting with other people's horribly formatted text and fixing it gives me great pleasure. I'm not sure what happened in this class! Perhaps it was working with a MacBook Pro, or perhaps it was just that I didn't feel connected to the assignment, but I didn't love it as much as I usually do. One thing that I think we all enjoyed was listening to each other be confused by Macs. Teena was stressed out and that made me laugh. Then when I got stressed out, she laughed at me. And when one of the boys couldn't figure out why his computer was typing all in caps (his CAPS LOCK was on), we all laughed.

Five things I changed from Marlo's original, wonderfully horribly formatted original PowerPoint:
  1. I took all of the text and put it on a total of six slides instead of the original three.
  2. I added some relevant photos
  3. I edited some of the text, as there were some grammatical errors, spelling errors, syntax errors, etc.
  4. I added a decent first page with an interesting and beautiful photo and a descriptive title.
  5. I chose colours that were associated with the topic of fire (orange and black) for the background and fonts.
My version is obviously superior. Looking at it at the end is definitely enjoyable. But I think I like this part the best - the explaining what I did. Or perhaps the part I liked best was the part where Maurice and I learned how to "print screen" with a Mac (ctrl+shift+4 and then select the area you want OR ctrl+shift+3 if you just want to select the whole screen).

Friday, September 12, 2008

Introduction

Well hello!!! My name is Kathleen, but I go by Kate. I come from a small town in the West Kootenays of British Columbia. It`s very beautiful there, and Lethbridge is much windier! I have been here for four years already (I completed my Bachelor of Music this spring) so I am pretty sured to it by now. Currently, I am in my first year of the University of Lethbridge's Bachelor of Education program. I am pretty sure I'm going to be a music teacher in life, whether it's at an elementary school, a high school, a university, or in my own home.


Some of my interests include playing the piano, singing, writing songs, badminton, dancing, taking pictures, roller blading, Scattegories, laughing and having fun. I love chocolate (milk chocolate, not so much dark) more than almost anything in the world and I love to bake because then I get to eat delicious food.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Harsh

I am so very unimpressed!!! Someone has flagged my blog as inappropriate!! This is my Education blog!! This is the very place a person would most certainly not put inappropriate material! I received the following message when signing in.
This blog has been locked and unpublished due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.

This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review.
How uncool. So now I have requested a review. And real people will have to review it before it is back up.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

My first blog


I never intended to do this. Honestly. The closest things to blogs I've ever done are "Kate's Soap Opera" (a strange blog-type thing I created in grade eight), and "Notes" on facebook. I didn't really want to write about my life that much - only because it makes me seem like I feel like my life is so important that everyone should read about it.

But now I'm in Education (I'm not even sure this is what I want to do, but I know I'll enjoy it nonetheless) and creating a blog is the first assignment in Ed3508 - Communications Technology. So there ya are. A blog. I hope I don't get addicted. I already have a problem with facebook. However, this one is definitely going to be restricted to Education topics.