This is a video I created for the EDMD 3300 class that outlines  my goals for Fall of 2012. My primary focus in this is outlining the academic goals that I hope to achieve by the end of the semester. Hopefully, come December, I can go back to this video and will have accomplished all of these goals.

Mobile learning does seem like a useful means of making students interact with the lesson. And, according to educational pedagogy that type of kinesthetic learning does help students to better internalize lessons, therefore I probably would consider doing an activity similar to this in my classroom. Being interested in secondary education I would probably stray from working with texts such as "The Ugly Duckling" but it might be interesting for students to work together and document recreations of other texts such as "Lord of the Flies" then utilize an application like iMovie or Photostory to narrate their creations. An activity like this would engage the students in the text and demonstrate their understanding of plot. 

I would definitely be interested in implementing e-books into my classroom, if the resources were available. E-books would open far greater opportunities for a Language Arts class. With these tools teachers can download a greater number of texts for a smaller cost and the iBooks app allows students to annotate the text without collateral damage to the work like marking up an actual text would create. Another upside to an e-book is that digital editions of books do not suffer the same wear-and-tear that books do from everyday abuse (bent covers, missing pages, etc.). Therefore the school would not have to reorder books as frequently. 

For the Photostory project I used iMovie. I used this program because my computer was already equipped with it. Also, I have created a few iMovie projects in the past and felt like it was best to work with a program that I was comfortable with. 

Thus far the projects from class have been informative. For the most part I have enjoyed them and felt like I've walked away with a greater understanding of the technology that is available to teachers. My only qualm about some of the projects is that much of the material seems geared towards a juvenile level. As a secondary education major, learning about asking plot questions for children's books and things of that nature sometimes is frustrating just because I don't feel as if those skills will apply as much. But I also recognize that the secondary education majors are far outnumbered by elementary and early childhood education majors and therefore see the necessity to gear lessons toward dealing with younger students.