Day is Done...

So I had my taste in making videos this week.  The animoto was quite fun actually and easy to use.  I could definitely see myself getting an educator account to be able to make longer presentations with this.  This would be great on a school library page to showcase the events in the school. I tried to embed the video here, but either I needed a better account with them or I am just not quite savvy enough yet to.  So the address is the best I could do for now.

http://animoto.com/play/9cXtVWQzLhoilcHZQwJlCw


I realized that I never got to come back and tell you about the other two video websites I played in.  www.powtoons.com is SO much FUN! I could play on there for awhile.  I will be using this with my children.  THis is an excellent use of making ebooks, or animations, or sharing poetry! I tried to upload it in my google+ account, but it the window wouldn't change, and I never found it, so I will have to play some more with that.  However, I did figure out how to publish it on youtube.com. Maybe I can find it and post a link here.  Until then here is a pic of the final slide, and Ill give you the poem I just made up on the fly to test this site out:

A single candle sits on the sill,
Keeping the night away and the ghostly chill,
Snow begins to fall and the ghost says, "Oh, Nose!
"I can't feel my fingers, and I can't feel my toes!"

The last site I want to talk about is Wideo.  It is similar to PowToons, only you can control the animations in this site.  I found PowToons to be more immediate user friendly, however with time, a user can create some amazing animations with Wideo.  I could see this being used in a computer graphics class, or for teacher presentations. If one has more that thirty minutes to play around and need an awesome presentation, I would suggest this one. 

Dream a little Dream of...

Libraries! This past week i searched through library websites and came upon a few I liked, some i didn't and some that didn't even seem like a website at all.. But here are two links of websites that I did enjoy. The first is from GMS library, created by Alison J. Maliszewski: http://gmslibrarywebsite.weebly.com/
I enjoyed this layout.  The background was simple and reminded me of reading in a tree house, as it also has a motif of books lined up across the top of the website.  There wasn't a lot of font change but used color for separation. The pictures were not all encompassing but added to the text.  It was simple yet lead you deliberately through the site.  I'll be taking ideas from this one for my practice.

This next one is from H.R. Moye and the first thing that caught my attention, that I absolutely LOVE and will be doing on my practice and any other website I try my hand at, is the use of a quote in the opening page.   There were subdued colors that let my mind easily feel as though I were walking through the quiet aisles of their library. Excellent choice in my opinion.  The link to Wonderopolis was cool to be frank and how they had the tabs to the other pages were clearly presented which added to the ease of the website navigation.  This website was probably my favorite of the ones I looked at.  The more you scrolled down the more cool links they had as a bonus almost such as Tumblebooks and pictures from the school year.  I just really enjoyed rummaging through all there was to find.  I hope you do too!
http://hrmoyelibrary.weebly.com/ (about the only thing I wish this one had was who created it and when it was last updated more clearly stated..)

Nightmare on Tech Street

This has been a very frustrating week for me.  The multiple audio's I tried never seemed to work or the websites would tell me that I could not download it for some reason.  I've still been trying and am trying to remain optimistic... Maybe today will be the day I figure it out.  Until then, the frustrating madness will continue.  I will be posing the slide doc I attempted today.  Hopefully it is something in the right nature as that was just as confusing and frustrating to me.  With more practice I'm sure I could understand it better but wanted to post my feelings- if only just to vent and come back to a clean slate to work from!
 Here's looking at you kid...

Here is the update! I don't know if I did this right but I really tried.  I have even emailed the author I was doing this on.  I wanted to take the hint and do this on Margarita Engle whom I am doing a Prezi on.  She is a fascinating author with many awards and acknowledgements to her books.  However, finding information on her life is incredibly difficult! So hard that I even found her email and have emailed her with loads of questions to try and learn more.  I don't have Word on my computer so I used the OpenOffice.  I ended up having to snip it because it wouldn't let me download. The graph I could not figure out how to change the dates.  I finally threw my hands up and nearly pulled my hair out.  My hope was to do a sort of timeline on her life.  Starting from when her father went to Cuba, met her mother and fell in love.  She would summer in Cuba and I did find that one summer in 1960 diplomatic relations between the states and Cuba broke down.  It was incredibly difficult to get home and after that communication with that part of her family was restricted.  I'd like to come back to it and keep updating it.   Maybe even getting it to work! Until then, I'm going to try and tackle this audio link, again... maybe this time with success.
One can dream....

Infographic

This was pretty difficult but worth the knowledge learned.  I wish I could have more time to learn more about the tools to improve the product more.  The text boxes were difficult to navigate.  I also didn't like how I could customize the colors.  It's possible I just haven't found the tool to be able to do that.  I really got frustrated and turned in the towel when my computer froze and I feared I was going to lose everything I had worked on.  Luckily, my better half came up with a solution.  He used his great camera and took a picture of the screen.  We then uploaded it onto my computer where I was able to use it as an attachment for here.

"The six aptitudes are: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.

Mastering these aptitudes is not sufficient; leveraging these aptitudes has

become necessary for professional success and personal fulfillment in today’s

world." (Presentation Zen)

    I hope that I was able to portray this kind of leveraging in my first infographic.  It was a learning experience.  The design was not an afterthought, but purposeful as it is suggested it should be in the text. I stopped and thought of what I was trying to give to the reader.  This was how poetry helps readers or even if it did.  I had looked at a lot of infographics but when I accessed them on my own computer, I couldn't get the ones I truly liked.  This ended up being a happy accident because the few I could I found this one which I liked but had different information on it.  I realized it was perfect for the information that I had.  I changed some to help with its simplicity.

      "What we need are people who can recognize the patterns and are skilled at seeing the nuances and simplicity that may exist in a complex problem."  (Presentation Zen) The symphony of this piece was my attempt to show the difference between average and special education as well as how poetry reasserts itself in adult readers. 

    "The dull, text-filled slide approach is common and normal, but it is not effective. The problem is not one of tools or technique—it is a problem of bad habits. While some tools are better than others, it is possible to present effectively with the aid of multimedia tools." (Presentation Zen) I was trying to stay away from a great amount of text but found it incredibly difficult.  Maybe its my bad habits.  Looking back I could have tried to find pictured to represent some of the written text that was beside the pictograph I used.  But I am unsure if that would have been effective there or just distracting and confusing.  All in all, I'm rather happy with this first attempt and want to use it more and more effectively. I will definitely be tinkering more with these.