Journal 7: Collaborative Documents

Collaborative Documents is where people can meet within a website and collaboratively work on a document. Each person can be invited to work on a specific document and add what they want to the work in progress. I decided to choose this tool on Collaborative documents because I enjoyed my experience with google docs. The assignment we used google docs for intrigued my interest in other types of collaborative document methods. Many of the threads that addressed collaborative documents had nothing but positive things to say. A lot of the people praised google docs for its methods, they said it was easy to use, and offered a lot of options that other collaborative sites did not offer. The other sites that they suggested are as follows: YourDraft - Online draft - shared editing - No registration neccessary http://www.yourdraft.com/, WriteWith - online collaborative word processing http://writewith.com/, Zoho Writer - online collaborative word processing http://writer.zoho.com/, WriteBoard - online collaborative wordprocessing http://writer.zoho.com/. The website for Zoho was also highly recommended. They stated that it allowed people to make collaborative spreadsheets and presentations. Some of these collaborative document sites allow instant messaging to be going on while working on the document so people can talk directly through instant messaging. The only problem people were mentioning with google docs and other sites is the school district they worked with restricted such programs. Some said they did not like the students of having the ability to instant message while working on the assignment. All in all I think collaborative documents is wonderful and I plan on implementing into my future classrooms.

Journal 6: Kidspiration and iMovie

I really enjoyed using the program kidspiration, it was very easy to use and good to use for organizing ideas. I feel that this program would be great for students in Elementary school. It is very easy to manage and does not require a lot of skill. I think this would be very good for students that are preparing to write papers and need a program to organize their thoughts. Kidspiration is very good at presenting ideas to young children. The students can also use the program to present ideas they feel are important to them. The cluster I created on kidspiration is meant for young children. I plan on teaching kindergarten, so the cluster I designed is very simple. It is meant to teach kids the different seasons and the months that correlate with each season. Although this is a very easy topic it is essential for young children to learn. I think kidspiration offers a fun way to learn this topic. Atomic Learning had great tutorials which guided me on how to use kidspiration. I found the tutorials to be very helpful, if I got stuck on how to do something with my mind mapping I went back to atomic learning and let the short video help with what I wanted to do. Atomic Learning like kidspiration was extremely easy to use, which makes me want to use again for other programs I would like to become familiar with. I really liked using kidspiration and atomic learning to complete the attached mind map.

iMovie was such a fun program to use as well. It was really easy to manipulate and create a movie using this particular program. iMovie allowed me to split film and edit film at the click of a button. I also liked using this program because it is a lower end and free program that allows you to do a lot of editing that an expensive program allows you to do. I would recommend iMovie to people just learning how to make movies. It made me feel like I was really good at making movies. I always thought that making movies and adding special effects would be extremely difficult and not handy at the click of a button. This is not to say that film making is easy. This particular program allows someone to add different weather features, transitions between different sections of the film, and background music. I loved using iMovie and plan on using it for future projects.