Brain Rules Intro & Chapter 1 Notes

Chapter 1 was interesting and definitely made me want to keep up an exercise program. This week, I created my notes in a program called Juxio (www.juxio.com). This was a new one for me. Essentially, you're creating posters using images and text. The template I choose allowed me to choose a certain number of characters and then fill those characters with images. I chose images of roadways, exercising and brains in addition to screen shots of text that represented what I learned in the chapter. It was easy to upload images and insert them; it works by drag and drop. When I started, I thought I'd be able to insert text directly, but couldn't figure it out (hence the text screen shots).

The good thing is that if you want to share online, it's free. You can share via email, twitter or Facebook, or you can save it as a pdf. However, I had trouble making it something that would work for the blog. I ended up having to share it on Facebook in order to get a link to copy and paste into the blog itself. In order to get the actual image in the blog, I ended up doing was saving it as a PDF, then taking a screen shot and uploading it to the blog as an image.

I can see this being useful in teachers or students expressing ideas or arguments visually. They even have some templates that are set up for younger kids to use. Overall, I think this technology worked for what I wanted to do as I felt that what I learned from this chapter was best expressed through images. Much of language in the chapter brought images up and make comparisons that were visual in nature. Maybe introductions could be done using this, or it could be used for students to concisely express the end of unit learning. Most of the limits are put on you because they want you to pay for print outs of your poster, which may be worth it if you were doing it for a class you were teaching or you had students creating posters. If you would like to view a larger version of this image, this link should work.