For my media project, I decided to create my own story in the style of Kevin Henkes' mouse books. I had a WONDERFUL time planning and creating this story!!!!
View the final video below or on YouTube.
View the final video below or on YouTube.
For my media project, I decided to create my own story in the style of Kevin Henkes' mouse books. I had a WONDERFUL time planning and creating this story!!!! View the final video below or on YouTube.
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Before completing this challenge, I had no idea that it was possible to merge data from an Excel document into a Word document! For my Word doc I wrote up a quick weekly letter that I might send out to parents on Fridays to keep them updated on the book that we had read in class that week, and which would be coming next week. I used the Excel database with all of Kevin Henkes' books and merged some of them into my letter.
Actually enacting the merge was a little bit trickier than I thought!!! In order to stagger the book titles in my document, I ended up making a new column in my Excel document so that I could use the two different values in the merge fields. What would have been easier--though I didn't figure this out until after I had finished--would have been to set a rule using the options from the mail merge command toolbar that would have allowed me to skip to the next value if the first had already been used. Something to think about for next time and try out on my own!! Download and view my final Word document here. Image credit For this challenge, I wanted to create a database for the books that I will be working with for my course theme. I chose Kevin Henkes' works as my theme, but since my focus is kindergarten-age children, I narrowed my database down so that it only included picture or children's books. I think a list of books would be helpful to have because I could send it out to parents. That way, they would be aware of and possibly be able to purchase the books that we would be working with in class as well as other books by the same author.
In the last badge, I also focused on Henkes' children's books, but my spreadsheets were more specific to the critically-acclaimed mouse books, which are his most popular. I thought it would be interesting and helpful for a well-rounded theme to be able to expand my focus from my previous badge but also narrow down the focus from my original theme as a whole, which is why I've created this database. Download and view my database here. Image credit For this badge, I learned how to make effective spreadsheets on Excel in order to organize relevant data. Because my theme for this course encompasses the works of children's book author Kevin Henkes, I was a little stumped at first as far as what data I could make into a spreadsheet. I finally settled on the number of awards won for Kevin Henkes' famous mouse books, and displayed the data over a series of decades.
This data serves to prove the legitimacy of my topic, first and foremost; I was a little apprehensive at first that it wouldn't be taken seriously, but now I have the award data to back up these critically acclaimed children's books and their merit. As the spreadsheet shows, Kevin Henkes has won 37 awards in total for his 7 mouse books; one of those awards was even received in 2013, ten years after the original publication date, from the Children's Literature Association for an award given specifically to books that the Association believes deserved more recognition upon publication. Secondly, this data regards my theme alone, so it is relevant as well. Getting to format the spreadsheet and make it visually appealing was great for me as well, because I do have experience formatting Word documents but I don't usually take as much time to format Excel sheets, so it was a great opportunity to branch out and expand my skillset. Download and view my fully formatted spreadsheet here. Image credit Badge 3 was designed to help us better navigate Microsoft Publisher and use it effectively. For this badge, I came up with an idea for a brochure that might be helpful to relay key information to others. In order to complete this challenge, I became a teacher and decided to advertise for the newly completed renovations of the library close to my school. This would be relevant to my theme because of my focus on literature by a specific author. The library renovations would mean the reopening of the children’s wing, which was closed to students and their parents until now. The books that we're discussing in class would be readily available for them to check out and read together at home in addition to class activities.
View my completed brochure here. Image credit For this challenge, I chose a brand-new lesson plan and updated it, but I used Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word in order to see the differences in working with different word processors and compare the two experiences.
It was certainly different working to create a lesson plan in Google Docs than it was using MS Word, like I was used to. The most difficult thing for me was working on formatting, because I was so used to the freedom offered in Word to quickly and easily format an entire document or just specific aspects of a document. With Google Docs, I had to format individual parts of the table I created one at a time, which was much more tedious than Word, which had options to change the layout of an entire table at once to create, for example, variations in shading for certain cells. It was also tough to move around images so that they wouldn't distort the text; Word offers more flexibility on that front as well. However, I liked that Google Docs did for the most match up formatting with Word so I ended up with similar-looking lesson plans, formatting-wise. Another main difference between the two is accessibility. The Google Doc was great to work on because I was able to access it no matter what computer I was on, and if I was working on this project with someone else they would be able to access it as well and work on the lesson plan without us having to email it back and forth over and over again for each little change. There would also be no compatibility issues with previous versions or problems with sharing a Word document among different programs. However, when I went certain places I had no Wi-Fi and that made it impossible to work on because I was unable to access my Drive without internet. Word, by contrast, is always accessible on a computer that has it installed. See my updated lesson plan here. Image credit I chose to update this lesson plan about poetry and meter for this challenge. Although it doesn't directly relate to my course theme, I figured another literary-based lesson would be important to include in this course. I chose this particular one to update and improve specifically because it's a little different. The Kevin Henkes books that my theme is centered around don't rhyme, so I wouldn't ever get the chance to introduce poetry to my students unless I strayed from the course theme a little bit. Of course, in the lesson plan I included a bit where the teacher compares the lines in Green Eggs and Ham to a prose book in the classroom, so if I was teaching this lesson with my theme I could easily use a book relating to my theme to compare!
I loved getting the opportunity to make my lesson plan look good most of all. I had a lot of fun with the formatting so that it would look professional but also be engaging, fun, and readable. Download and view my updated lesson plan here. (Sam-I-Am character, design, and artwork belong to Theodore Geisel [Dr. Seuss]) For the first challenge for Badge 2, I had to choose two lesson plans and write up a list of strengths and weaknesses for each. This was a useful experience because up until this point, I had never considered the ways lesson plans were standardized and all of the criteria they had to meet.
When I first saw both lesson plans, I thought they looked great! I didn't realize until I began to evaluate them that they would have been tough to implement because they didn't have all of the requirements of a really high-quality lesson plan. Image credit Before using Evernote, I assumed it would be similar to the StickyNotes application on my desktop - a simple app that made it easy to leave myself little notes for things I should keep in mind. I was pleasantly surprised to realize the true potential of a program like Evernote. The ability to capture entire articles is great, and it works like a more user-friendly bookmarks folder. I'm particularly excited about the ability to sync my notes to my phone so that I can access them whenever I need to!
Program: Evernote I've used Twitter before, but always in a social media context. I've opened a new account strictly for the purpose of following educational technology Twitter accounts in order to receive updates that may not be accessible via my RSS feed. I haven't tweeted anything yet from this account, but I can still access it and scroll through my feed to stay abreast of anything going on within the EdTech community.
Account: @agoins270 |