Animating the classroom

I have been working with PowerPoint for a long time and I am familiar with how to animate slides, but I had never really considered all of the educational purposes. I liked learning in more detail about how to animate various parts of slides and consider the uses of animation in the classroom.

Working with Inspiration was a new experience for me. I have always heard about it, and wanted to learn more about it, so I was excited to learn how to use it. I have also come across some lesson plans that suggest using Kidspiration, so I am looking forward to learning more about that software, and hopefully being able to use it in my classroom in the future.

Overall, I think using animation is a lot easier than I had originally anticipated, and I can see how it would have very practical uses in the classroom, and in professional development.

I think I might start a GarageBand...

Working with audio files is a lot easier than I had anticipated. Since I have just recently become a Mac user, I thought I would take advantage of learning to use GarageBand. I really liked that you could record your own songs or podcasts.

I started practicing recording a podcast, just to test my microphone and learn more about sound editing. Similar to MovieMaker, you can simply record yourself speaking, and bring in songs and then drag and drop them to rearrange them. You can also easily add pictures, or PowerPoint slides to show up as visual aid for your podcast. Recording is a lot easier than I thought and you can crop your sound bites, lock them together, separate them, and even have them play in overlay.

Now if only I could come up with a good topic for my audio file that I am going to create...