Welp... this is it.... this semester is almost done. It went by soooo fast!! Anyway, there isn't much to do anymore, the last assignments are a Google Sites portfolio,
an Excel sheet for grading purposes
and a lesson on something related to our field of major; Two of which I already did.
This class was wonderful. As I've said before, the best class I've ever taken. Everything was fun from beginning to end. Not too stressful and not too strict either; Just perfect. I'm going to miss you professor Ferrer... hopefully I get to see you again in Metodología y Práctica.
So, as always... here we go with the embed works and hyperlinks. Over here is my Google Sites portfolio that the professor assigned us. I didn't bother to make a new one because i had already started one in a previous class so this has a lot of material from a class about kids with special needs and exceptionalities.
Now, over here is the Excel spread sheet done for grading purposes. This was very helpful and fun to make. It was relatively simple to follow all the steps of the tutorial video provided by the professor to make this sheet. It looks very neat, professional and i'm certain i'm always going to use this tutorial as all the other video tutorials the professor has provided us with.
Next post will be my lesson on Morphology and then it's over for the semester. It's going to be hard to top this one... Hasta la próxima!
Well this week was fun. I can honestly say, this has been one of the best classes i have ever taken, and probably will ever take in my college career. The professor gave one of the best assignments ever! He wanted us to use Facebook and Twitter for 48 hours (24 hrs. each). We were supposed to use these platforms exactly how we use them on the regular, but with the difference that on Facebook, he created a page specifically for the class and we're supposed to post everything we do throughout the day on that page. For Twitter, we have to use the hashtag, #edpe3129 with every tweet we post.
I have no idea how the professor comes up with projects like these but I love them. Professor Ferré always breaks from the norm of all the other regular classes. As college students, we constantly deal with simple minded professors who can't come up with creative assignments to save their lives so this class is like a breath of fresh air.
The assignment went great for me, however, I'm not really big on social media when I'm taking classes back to back throughout the day so my participation was not very active. I managed to post about three times each day and I felt like that was a lot. The purpose of the exam was to evaluate how effective was the communication within social media and then see if we could apply it in the classroom as a learning tool for our students. In the class' website we had to post a reaction that evaluated the two social media sites and say how it affects education nowadays. Here is my reaction to the assignment.
Also this week, we created an info-graphic chart which displayed the topic that we chose for the Power Point presentation with a voice over assignment.
For this, we used the website Piktochart. We chose a template that could accommodate our information and then we posted it on the class' website too. Here is the chart I created about Distance Education which is the topic I chose for the presentation.
This has been one of the most interesting projects i have ever done. This class has been filled with a lot of "firsts" for me. As mentioned in the previous reflections, The professor assigned a major project in which we had to do research about a specific topic about our field of major; I chose Distance Education. One of the things that the professor taught us to do (which i found the most helpful to make power point presentations) was to make an original template, personalized to fit your presentation perfectly, instead of using the ones provided by Power Point. I LOVED this tutorial because, from now on, I will NEVER use a regular template again; once you know how to create original templates, you can never go back!
Here is what my first template looked like:
Eventually, I decided it didn't look good enough so i made another one and this is the one I used for my presentation:
The best part about this whole assignment was the bonus for this project. The mission was to make a video of yourself explaining some points about your presentation and incorporate it within the presentation so that you could appear inside the video presentation. The professor did not give us any tutorials on how to do this. He left it all to ourselves to figure out this extra credit bonus that had a value of 5% of the whole grade for the project. Of course, I started looking for sites to do this but often came up empty-handed.
At last, I found a site called VideStir which had this tool available and so, I got to work. Once I had the presentation done, the first thing I did was the voice-over for it, with the same tools that Power Point offers; I did not use any external sites for this presentation other than VideoStir to record myself (even though the professor recomended many, they did not work for me). I recorded my voice with my laptop's mic and I recorded myself with my phone's camera. After this, I exported the presentation as an mp4 video file to upload it with the one of myself and merge them together. I uploaded both videos to VideStir and it was surprisingly easy; Only thing I had to do was choose in which position I wanted the video and how big i wanted it to appear.
Once the videos merged, I was able to do some last tweaks on Windows Movie Maker and voilá; I had my video presentation! I am extremly proud of myself for acomplishing this and extremly grateful with the professor for giving me the opportunity to challenge myself and conquer!
Finally, here is my video presentation about Distance Education. I hope you enjoy it! I worked very hard on it. :D
Some weeks ago, the professor gave us a pretty heavy assignment where we had to do some research about copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property.
For this assignment we had to incorporate a lot of details about Microsoft Word which he taught us in a video presentation earlier in the semester. This assignment is due this week. I spent a long time doing this research and came up with very interesting learning points which I put into my research as you can see down here.
Also this week, the professor assigned a new big project in which we have to do a Power Point presentation with a voice over on a topic that's related to your field of major. He also pointed out a bonus that will earn us a 5% of our grade which is amazing!!! We'll see how this goes, it should be interesting...
The lesson for this week is about the internet! We learned everything about the
internet itself, what it is, what it's used for and who came up with this wonderful tool. At first, the internet was just a project of the Department of Defense of the United States. The main goal was to create an indestructible network where scientists from around the world could share information and collaborate in research and investigations from afar. We also learned that World Wide Web and Internet are NOT SYNONYMS! The internet is a big big network, the world wide web fall into the internet as one smaller web that gives you access to information and the ability to share it too. It was cool to learn how these two are different and how they both work.
As always, we had a quiz on this and we also had an assignment which was a little different than before. In the assignment we had to compare two softwares used to communicate via video chat. One is called Anymeeting and the focus of this one is to convey professional meetings or conferences with colleagues of whatever field you're in. The other software was Google Hangouts; now, this software is much more recognized than the one mentioned above. This is a very simple software that is used to communicate in a more casual way with family and friends. it was pretty simple to compare them both, although they both offer video chat, they are both useful in different contexts. On a professional context where you need to hold a meeting with some colleagues or your boss, use Anymeeting. If you're just looking to casually communicate with family or friends, Hangouts is the way to go.
It was pretty cool to do this assignment. Here are some screenshots I took to compare them.
