Journal # 9 :Software evaluation/Kidspiration& iMovie

Classifying Animals
Science
Primary Grades PreK–2
Purpose
This set of learning activities provides students with an experience in observing and classifying animals found at home and in zoos. As they increase vocabulary and critical-thinking skills, students will focus on the Characteristics of animals, including adaptations.
Description
Most children have an affinity for animals as pets and imaginary creatures. Students begin by investigating the characteristics of their own pets as well as familiar ones in their neighborhood. They make a preliminary set of generalizations about the animals, thereby creating an initial classification system. Students then look at zoo animals, comparing their characteristics with the classification system developed. In the end, students are guided to the general scientific classification system.

For inspiration software (as it shows above) I visited Kidspiration site which attracted my attention because I found it very useful for teachers and students. This site has different options for most of the school subjects like “Math”, “social science”, “history” and for all grades. The teachers can use this site to improve students’ abilities by applying various games such as matching tables or pictures. Students will have fun while practicing their knowledge through playing these games. The teacher can help the students to develop their technological and social skills by offering them to collaborate and working in groups for class projects. It can encourage the students to create new tables by mixing different graphs and pictures and to compete with each other. There are also free tutorials in this site too and some software which are useful for teachers and parents. I liked working with this tool and I believe that everyone can take good advantages from it because it is very simple and it has up to date information.These are some interesting sites related to Kidspirarion:
http://www.fifeeducation.org.uk/Kidspiration/websites.htm
http://www.caledonia.k12.mi.us/k12resource/ETAWeb/earth/HistoryoftheEarth.htm

Discussion:
Question#1: I enjoyed working in this program, Kidspiration, and I believe that it is a good and interesting program for the students to work with because they can learn a lot from this site while they are working on the games. This site has a lot of lessons which come with different games that can improve students’ learning skills. It can help them to create new programs related to their class lessons and they can share them with their friends.

Question # 2: The teacher can take a lot of advantages from this software. Because this software has different features like free tutorials, power point, flash document and others it would be very helpful in the class.
1- The teacher can use the different programs in each new lesson to enhance the students learning about that lesson.
2- The students can go through the software and create their own project with each other as a group work.
3- Some of the programs can be used to monitor students’ improvement.
4- The students can get help from this software if they have problem in their assignments.
5- It is software that students can create power point and blog and they can share their information through these programs.
6- The students can take some pictures and process them and send them to their blog and work on class project.
7- The teacher can always make her knowledge up-to-date by accessing to this software because it has new information and tutorial every 45 days.
8- The teacher or the students can find the answer of their questions just-in-time and they can save the time.
9- Working on this software besides helping students in their class lessons, can improve learners’ technology skills.

Question # 3: I Believe teaching is a demanding job. The teacher should be always very active and make her/ his knowledge up-to-date because she/he is the first person whom students get lesson from. So working with some soft ware like Atomic Learning can be a good help to accomplish this holly job. I found this program very interesting and useful. The tutorials and information in this software are very motivating and they can also give some new ideas to the teachers. Using different features like power point and podcast in the class can make the lessons more exciting for the students. The tutorial lessons and the opportunity to use the Excel are some features that I found very amazing.


iMovie:
One of the other soft wares that we learned about is iMovie which has with a lot of features and enables the user to make a movie out of short clips. We learned how to link the small segments together with a transition between frames, add introduction and our favorite song, and put still frames in the movie. The speed of the movie can become faster or slower by moving the arrow keys. And there is feature that can change the background and the weather of the movie from fogy weather to a rainy or windy one.

Discussions:
Q#1:I liked working with iMovie tool and it made me feel very proud of myself. I felt like a movie director! I believe it would be a very good tool for educational system too because students and teachers can get a lot of benefits from it.

Q#2:Teachers can encourage the students to create the movie according to their educational knowledge and thoughts and they can collaborate and share their products to complete a class project. For each subjects the students will take small segments with their digital cameras and share their videos, and then make a good movie from it; like, “the growth of a bean” for science subject. They take a short movie every day and after developing it, the result will be a documentary movie, which can be used for other classes in the school. It can improve learners’ technological skills and their self confidences too. These are some websites for teacher and students that can help them to create their own iMovies
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/category/imovie/
http://www.ket.org/education/video-mm-weblinks.htm