Final Project Reflection

I'm finished with my Final Project!! It's a lesson on Sentence Diagramming and Prepositional Phrases for a 7th Grade English Class. I have already been frustrated a great deal, even though thus far I have mostly only been observing my cooperating teacher, with the lack of knowledge that high-school students have of even minor grammatical concepts. Though the lesson is fairly basic, I think that even my high-school students would benefit from it. The real answer, however, is for the students to get a stronger grammar foundation even from a very young age.

I have really enjoyed putting together this project so far. I have been very frustrated with my You Tube link that doesn't seem to be working right no matter how much I mess with it. But I'm sure that I will learn . . . and now it DOES seem to be working! HOORAY!!

It's been incredible through this process just to see how much I have learned, and what a great platform that provides for me to be able to share knowledge with my students . . . in the hopes that someday they will each be Grammatical Nerds, just like their teacher!!

The three primary types of technology that I used for this lesson are:
1) SMART Board
2) S-Present
3) You Tube.

The SMART Board was something I found very intimidating at the beginning of this semester, but now I feel quite competent and adept in my use of it. I am so excited that I was able to create my own lesson that my students can use with the SMART Board! They can diagram sentences directly on the computer screen using the interactive pens provided.

Secondly, I used a You Tube video within my presentation. Shockingly, I had never used or been exposed to You Tube before this class, except for hearing of it briefly and from a distance from friends, etc. Now, I feel like I can not only look up any kind of video that I would like to use for my class, but I can even link it to a lesson or copy the HTML or URL code to a slide in a presentation . . . like I did for this lesson! I can't believe how easy it is for me now! Pretty soon, maybe I'll even have the courage to MAKE MY OWN VIDEO!!

Finally, and what I am MOST proud of, I used S-Present . . . which is free software that I discovered during the on-line conference! It's power-point software, but SOO much cooler than Microsoft . . . plus it's free, and you can use it to publish your own presentations and then either email them to yourself or someone else, or embed the URL inside of a blog (like I've done here). On S-Present, you can add audio links, video links, or a huge array of clip-art, images from Flikr, etc., or different URL's within the lesson. It's an amazing device that links all the new technology with a power-point presentation . . . so that we can use all of the great software we've learned about in Tech. in Ed. directly in a lesson plan! Plus, it becomes EVEN cooler once you hook it up to SMART Board, because you could link a web-based game right directly onto one of your slides, and then play it on the SMART Board within that slide . . .and then move right on to the next one.

I'm pretty excited about it . . . although I'm sure that there's still plenty I can discover about S-Present, I feel like an accomplished EXPERT when using this software, and I am sure that I will use it for other presentations and lesson plans in the future!! Thanks to the creators of S-Present!!