Enhanced Podcast Critique

Overview:
Enhanced podcasts are an information giving tool that allows people to give out information to others that are scattered to many different places.  The difference between these enhanced podcasts and audio podcasts are the video element added to enhanced podcasts.  These types of podcasts include video and many other visual elements to make the spoken information pop, or enhance what the speaker is speaking about.

Likes:
These types of podcasts are very fun to make.  I can spend hours and hours working on video and just having fun.  It's great to be able to take an audio file and enhance it with pictures for various topics, add video to show examples of what I'm talking about, or even add an element of humor

Dislikes:
These types of podcasts are very time consuming!  It will take a number of videos to understand every part of your video editing software.  I struggled with how to do very fine tuning to my video that I had not seen in previous classes or experiences with other videos that I made.

In the Classroom:
These can be used as a great way to give students a break from potentially monotonous lectures.  It's also a great way for students to create presentations.  On a large scale, it may be useful to get information out to parents, but with the busy schedules of administrators, this may not be the most efficient.

Overall:
It's fun to create these types of podcasts, and if you have the extra time (maybe during the summer?) you can become very efficient at creating these for your students.  This would be a great tool to use to allow students who are artistic and don't want to be in front of the room to express information that they've learned.

Desmos Critique - Additional Tool

About: 
Desmos is an online calculator that allows students to graph functions of many different complexity levels. This online graphing calculator has a great interface, allowing a student to immediately begin using it as soon as the student arrives at the site.

Likes:
I like this program because it is so smooth to use.  As soon as you get to the website, you can start using the program.  It's free, and even linkable to your Google Drive so you can create graphs from Google Drive.  Because it's free, students who cannot afford a calculator can use this at home to do their homework.

Dislikes:
Desmos isn't nearly as powerful as I would like it to be.  It would be nice to have a program that can be a direct substitute for a TI-84, even though it's a stretch to expect that such a powerful tool could be free.  For students who need a calculator, they need internet access.  It would be nice to be able to use the utility offline, and make it transportable.

Uses in the Classroom:
Desmos is a great utility for students who may not have, or cannot afford, a graphing calculator. Many teachers have class sets of graphing calculators, but due to expense, many do not let the students take those calculators home to do their homework. So, while this tool isn't necessarily designed to be used in the classroom per se, it is a great tool for students to use at home in order to be prepared for class.
Overall: 

Artifact:

Tagxedo Critique - Artifact 1

Artifact pictured above.  Snowflakes are a type of fractal that is often discussed in mathematics.

Overview:
Tagxedo is a word cloud creating program that allows you to use websites or lists of words in order to create graphics for many uses.

likes:
Tagxedo is very easy to use.  Infact, if you google Tagxedo, you are able to immideately go to the sites create page and start creating word clouds.

Tagxedo is also easy to understand once you get to the website.  If you click "create" on the google page, you are immediately taken to the interface to create your word cloud.  The interface is very easy to manipulate in order to create your graphic.  Every time you change something in the interface, the graphic graphic updates in order to show an up-to-date word cloud.  During your manipulation, you can even upload your own pictures to use as the word cloud.

Dislikes:
Tagxedo has a shop to purchase products from the site which means to me that the creators of the tool are not necissarily 100% dedicated to the web 2.0 tool.  There are advertisements posted on home page which are a bit distracting.  If you want to have full use of the site, you should create an account and pay for some of the more intracate/advanced options.  During the creation of the word cloud, you can only paste words into text box, cannot type directly into the box.  While you can connect words with a ~, you cannot cluster certain words together.

Uses in the Classroom:
This tool is a great alternate way to show knowledge and can create a very interesting presentation piece - especially if a student takes the time to copy the most important words first in order to make them larger.  It can also assist students in organizing their thoughts during a presentation by discussing the smallest to largest words, or vica verca.

Overall:
This is not a large tool that would not make prominant in my classroom.  I would allow my students to use this tool to create a different way of presenting information, especially if they need a visual component to the project.

Quizlet Critique - Artifact 2

Overview:

Likes:

While I was working on my artifact, my computer's browser crashed.  I was devistated that my work had all dissapeared.  When I went back to the site later in order to start over, I had a wonderful message asking if I wanted to continue working on the project I had started or if I wanted to discard it.

My heart soared.

Other things I enjoyed about quizlet is how easy it is to log in using my already established educational google account.  It's nice to have one more way to connect my educational tools.  I also like how easy it was to begin creating sets of flash cards, or quizzes.  Because many people use this tool for second language learners, you are required to establish which language you are using. To make this easier, the site has easily clickable languages that are most used.  You do not have to wade through a long list of the languages of the world

Dislikes:

In order to make full use of the site, you must have an account.  The creating of whole sets of "cards" is very time consuming, especially if you are writing in two different languages.  Further, you may need to adjust your computer settings in order to use the keyboard associated with the language you are trying to use.  Because the tool is so easy to use, more complicated math types such as "greater than or equal to" signs are impossible to include depicted the same way as one would hand write the sign.

Uses in the Classroom:

The uses of this tool in the classroom are vast.  Quizlets can be created to study vocabulary, work through various problems, practice through quizzing yourself, and more.  For the math classroom, I can see myself using this to help students learn vocabulary, and while it is possible to teach procedure through these quizlets, it is difficult to learn or practice procedure.

Overall:

I had fun using quizlet to make the artifact below.  It was fun and entertaining on my part, and I would hope that my students would find it a unique way to practice mathematics.  However, if I were to use this as a consistant tool, it would be time consuming and hard to pull together.  The quizzes require a student to type in verbatim the definitions used in these flash cards which can lead to very high levels of frustration.

Artifact:

Podcast as a Tool Critique

Overview:
Podcasts can be use as a tool in any number of envioronments.  Podcasts provide a way of communicating with a large group of people in an individual way.  The formats for podcasts are limited by the imagination of the person creating the podcast, but typically has some formulaic elements such as the podcaster's name, the date, and location of the podcaster in the intro.

Likes:
Podcasts are a great way to get information out to a large group of people.  What is nice is that you don't have to get that large goup of people together in one place in order to distribute said information.  Listeners can listen to the podcast from anywhere they have acess to the internet allowing a multitude of comfortable locations for listening in today's technological society.

Podcasts are extreemely diverse.  As said earlier, similar to formats for creating podcasts, the subjects those podcasts cover are as diverse as the human mind.

Dislikes:
In a world where we have been continuosly required to be visual people, it can be distracting for people who are required to listen to a particular podcast to actually listen to it without going off and stimulating their eyes elsewhere.  It is for that reason that I prever vlogs or enhanced podcasts.

In the Classroom:
Podcasts are great for getting additional information out to your students that they aren't necessarily going to be tested over, or that you think they may find interesting.  They are a great tool for students to listen to instructions and then attempt to work problems at home through step by step procedures where you expect your student to pause the podcast, then play again when they are ready for the next step.

Overall:
While podcasts are often entertaining, people can easily get distracted away from the podcast, especially if they are young and distractable.  Podcasts tend to focus on the topid at hand and do not stray, hence allowing a resource for direct, straightforward information.  However, this information may not be accurate.

Wikispaces Critique

Wikispaces is a wiki hosting site that allows you to have numerous people contributing to a website.  More specifically, a wiki becomes a website that allows collaboration between users in order to edit its content.

Likes:

I am a huge fan of collaboration.  I enjoy working with people who are just as passionate about working on a project as I am.  Using wiki's and their hosting sites create a great place to collaborte.  I like how a wiki's end product shows the teamwork of a number of people who work together.

Dislikes:

I dislike the limitations that pop up in wikis when applying them to potential mantematical topics.  It's very hard, if not impossible, to use math type in a wiki.  Students would have to post a picture of the math type in order to incorperate math into a wiki.  If another student sees an error and attempts to fix the error, they would have to create a completely new graphic.

In the Classroom:

In a society where teamwork is becoming a requirement, and with common core, students will need as many options to work collaboratively as they can possibly get.  That in mind, wikis provide a very important option for students to work together and provide proof of that collaborative effort.

Overall:

I like wikis overall.  In education, they have more useful/pros than cons.  Unfortunetely many of those cons appear when one is attempting to use wikis in the mathematics classroom.  I look forward to working with wikis more and talking with other math teachers who use wikis so that I can make it be a positive tool in my educational toolbox.

Record MP3 - The easy podcast tool

About:
Record MP3 is an online recording tool that easily allows for the recording of podcasts and other sound recordings and then allows you to save those recordings in mp3 format - the currently most widely used audio format.

Likes:
If you pay attention, following the directions, it's very easy to use and even easier to begin putting out mp3s.  There are very few steps required create an mp3 from start to finish.  The tool allows for any microphone that is compatible with the computer you are using at the time.  Something else that I liked about this is that because your recordings are saved in mp3 format and the site gives you a link to your recording, those recordings are compatible with almost all other presentation software.

Dislikes:
On the front end, you really need to pay attention to the instructions or you will not be able to record, or you will be spending a lot more time than necessary to prepare for recording.  You need to be in an absolutely quiet room in order to create recordings because when you initially playback, the recording may sound one way, but on speakers presenting to a class, you will hear all the background noise during the recording.  Finally, I didn't like that you absolutely must remember to save the website given for your recording or it is lost forever.  You still have the saved mp3, but if you need the website it has been saved to, and you didn't save it, you've lost it.

Uses in the classroom:
This is especially useful for the classroom as a great alternative for shy students.  They can pre-record their assignment, and, instead of speaking in front of the class, they can provide the narrative, while manipulating the presentation, or working out the problem on the board.  Students can use this to create voice overs for various projects.

Overall:
Record mp3 is an amazing tool.  The website that hosts the tool is completely ad free - if there are ads, then I didn't notice then the many times that I have been to the site.