Week 4 Digital Technologies

Hi welcome to my week 4 blog post.  This week we looked further into digital technologies.  Let me tell you it has not been a very successful week!

Anyway here is an image that I uploaded to my blog of me teaching at school this year. I attempted the image resizing and downloaded Mobaphoto but was unsuccessful in getting that program to work.  I do however, see the benefits of being able to upload my own photos to the Internet as they do improve the overall look of webpages and blogs etc, and are great ways of showing evidence of activities and events.

Here is a link to my Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/109522626@N08/
You should be able to see the same image as the one above.
So far I see no benefit in using Flickr as you can look at photos pretty much the same way as through using Facebook.  The only thing I found with it, is that you can look at someone's photos in a similar format to a PowerPoint slide show which is different to Facebook, so I can see how that could kind of work in the classroom, but you can use PowerPoint to create and upload slideshows and publish them on YouTube to share over the Internet.

Here is my first ever Voki that I have created.  Hope you enjoy!

Using Voki's is a fun and engaging way to introduce students to technology.  It's also a really great tool for helping students to overcome stage-fright in that they can hide behind the voki and use their own voice for activities.  Also if a student has a speech impairment, they can type in a message into the Voki which essentially gives them their own voice!  How awesome for that student to be able to engage in conversation and expressing himself/herself with a voice.  Voki's are able to be used effectively beside podcasts in much the same way, however podcasts do not interpret typed text and require voice input to relay messages.  

This is my photostory that I created using Movie Maker for an art assignment at University.  Using Movie Maker and the like is another great way of engaging students with digital technology and creativity.  I do still raise concerns about having so much personal information broadcast over the Internet.  Hope you enjoy my little video: