Brain Rules Chapter 11 Notes

So this week, I tried making a comic. I used Pixton, and it was my first go with the website. Overall, it was incredibly easy and quick; however, also very limiting. I suppose there may have been more options, but if you select the Quickie option for a short comic then they give you the scene layout, the characters you can pick from and their positions on the screen. In addition, I had to categorize my comic, but it didn't fit into any of the categories they set out, which was frustrating. I could see this being used in the way that I did. To make a comment about what was read or to take quick notes on something to remember it. However, I think I would try looking at other free comic creators first.

Brain Rules Chapter 10

I used Google Draw in Google Docs this week. I've never used this feature before, but found that the simplicity was actually what I needed in order to create this cartoon. The problem I was running into with other programs was that I was limited to either pictures I had or whatever the program came with. None of the cartoon programs had the option drawing and making it a cartoon. I think this program could be useful in students not only creating mutlimodal projects, but doing so as a group (because of the group features of Google Docs). A problem that I did have with the program was it didn't have all the shapes I was looking for. I also had to photoshop a foam finger to make it work for this image.

Brain Rules Chapter 9 Notes

This week, I decided to play around with Prezi a bit more. I took a look at the samples provided a few weeks ago and made a master text type Prezi. I liked the three dimensional feel of the zooming in and out of words that I was able to create. Other than the obvious presentation work, something I liked about Prezi was the ability to share editing. I wonder how that would work all at the same time...

Brain Rules Chapter 9 on Prezi

Brain Rules Chapter 8 Notes

For this week, I took notes with blabberize. It was a lot of fun. I used my own photo, situated the mouth (I actually had to go all the way through to see how the lines coordinated with the way the mouth would open), recorded what I wanted to say and voila. I did take some time playing with recording on my computer-I used the voices that come with my Mac and tried to find one that was easy to understand, but also a bit fun. The best ones of course were hard to understand. I can see this being useful in the classroom as an introduction activity or a presentation that will allow students that are shy to "break the ice." The biggest downfall is that you can only have 30 seconds of audio. Enjoy!

Brain Rules Chapter 7

So this week I used Glogster, and not only do I like it a lot, but I wish I had more time to play. I feel like you could get lost in all the options they give to you. Something I didn't like was the small button that's given for audio files, and the lack of customization for that feature along with the inability to search for videos and things directly from the program (which some of the others have allowed). Overall, I can see this being used in many different ways from narratives, to research projects. I think I used this during a good week: just as we're really getting into the thick of multimodal composition.

http://trinamitchum.glogster.com/brain-rules-ch-7/

Brain Rules Chapter 5 Notes

This week I played around with Prezi. I had heard of this program before (and seen it in action), but haven't had the opportunity to use it at all yet. I love it. I can see it as a very useful tool for making presentations individually and as a group (I noticed that you can group edit). I think it would be useful to use as a class as well. You could do something like give each group an area to play around in and create kind of a class presentation. You can add videos, files, images, pre-made diagrams, shapes, etc. Overall, I like it because it's not linear-for the times that you need to return to a point or when a linear presentation is not conducive to the idea you want to present. Right now, I wish had more time to play with it. Maybe for our final assignment...

Copy of Brain Rules Chapter 5 on Prezi

Brain Rules Chapter 4 Notes

This week, I used popplet to take notes. This is the first time I used the program, and I did like it. I ended up creating a mind-map of sorts with a brain in the middle. I liked that I was able to add comments to each popple, and add things like googlemaps, facebook content, youtube videos and a link to a book on amazon that was relevant. I think this would be useful to a classroom setting in that students could use popplet's to try and pull ideas together individually, but also for group work. It could be used to help generate idea or to present ideas-you can export it as a presentation or a jpeg.

Brain Rules Chapter 3 Notes

Okay, so I downloaded Powernote (by Diigo) to my phone and I was going to use the speech note to record my thoughts and post it to the blog. Epic fail. First, it's speech to text, so it wasn't exactly what I thought. Second, it did an absolutely terrible job of converting speech to text, it does it slowly, and only catches a couple words at a time. Maybe handy for a grocery list, but not for my purposes. So, I went back to the web and found www.voicethread.com. This was a new technology to me, but was intrigued because you can have several people commenting on the same image or video, etc. at the same time in different ways. So what I did was upload the picture you see below, and then used each one of the features to flesh out my notes. I can see this being very helpful in a group project, but also in an individual project. If you were making notes to yourself as you went along. Can't wait to have the time to play with it more. The first recording, was just me talking into my speaker, the second was using my phone (yes, voicethread called me, but I only had three minutes to talk), the third note was text, and the final one was supposed to be video, but couldn't get it to work. (I didn't try for very long though).
 Enjoy!

Brain Rules Chapter 2 Notes

This week, I took a look at Stuxy as my new technology. It was brand new to me, and I actually had a lot of fun with it. Essentially, in Stixy, you create what they call a "Stixyboard," which allows you to collaborate on projects with others. It is limiting in that it seems you can upload documents and photos to work on, but that's about it. I liked the sticky notes and the to do lists that allowed for better collaboration. I also liked that it was "limitless." You weren't confined to just the space where you put your document, and you could have more than one document or photo in your Stixyboard. You could even have a different style sticky note for each person participating. It made the space seem more like a real idea board. I could see this being used in a group project that involved writing a paper together or something that could be saved as an image and changed within the software at a later date. I suppose you would just continue to upload new drafts as they came along. I again had the embedding issue. The technology itself is conducive to continued collaboration, so the best it would give me was a link to share with guests. I also took a screen shot so you could see the image directly in the blog.

Link to my Stixyboard

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.