Moving into new and exciting realms

Topic One.

So when push comes to shove...  I have to admit, I was a little worried about how things were going to go at the beginning of class since we were all trying to figure out how to divvy up the time which we had allotted for our presentations. Thankfully, we have Mahfoudha. She really got the ball rolling for all of us with the time breakdown she created. Once it became apparent that there would be just ten short minutes for everyone to present, it really got everyone thinking about how to creatively present their materials. While I may have decried the overuse of websites before, I'm not thinking seriously about building one, possibly a wiki with embedded video. Another thought would be to build a mini course in ANVILL... hmmmmm, I'm going to have to consider that one a little more. Just to add one more iron into the presentation fire, today I was introduced to what may be one of the coolest presentation platforms I've ever run across. It is called prezi. It allows free reign through slides, embedded video and audio, allowing people to go anywhere in your sandbox they'd like. It's sort of like those old "Choose Your Adventure" books.

Topic Two.

I found much of the material in this section of the class quite engaging, in particular using the wrap text function around clip art. I'll admit it, I'm a clip art fanatic, and I am frequently pulling clip art off the internet in order to build documents. In fact, using clip art, word and gimp, I was able to build a mind map for the lecture portion of LT 548. It looks like this.

As a GTF at the AEI this term, I use tables every day to build my daily lesson plans. However, I still learned a ton. By far, the coolest tricks were the text wrap and image transparency. I am glad to have these in my tool kit. I mixed it all in with some of the word techniques we learned in the previous CALL session, including bullet pointing. In fact, I was so jazzed that I converted the handout I created in class into a pdf and posted it on my blog right away.

Topic 3. 

Screencasting with Jing was definitely the high point of the day. While the topic I picked for my screencast was slightly outside of what is normally seen, I found it incredibly easy to download and install the software. It took me just minutes to have my screencast built and in Dr. Healey's inbox. I've been trying to wrap my head around how I can use this tool for language teaching and I've come up with the idea of building a treasure map using this tool. It can also be used for form focused instruction, showing students parts of sentences, parts of paragraphs and parts of essays. I can't wait to play with it and exploit all of the possibilities. Where I think this software falls down is in its reliance on the cloud. I would love to be able to embed these screencasts on webpages, but having only a link really limits its usability, in my estimation.