Power Point and Camera

So much, so many, where to begin? This week we covered PowerPoints, Picasa, and digital cameras. Personally I like PowerPoints when teachers use them properly. It makes lectures much easier for me. When teachers start writing ramdomly all over the board I have a tendancy to lose interest very quickly. They can be really helpful because you can put your main points on the slide and then elaborate verbally and you can use pictures also. It also helps keep me on track if I'm speaking and if you have students who are absent they can have a printed version of the slides with you notes at the bottom. I like Picasa! I've never used it but have heard about it. I think it's great to beable to store pictures somewhere that you can access outside of your home. Digital cameras are just cool in general. I think they would be great in any field but with science it will be really cool. Instead of looking at slides of rocks you can send your students to find them weather that be in their raw form or industrial.

So again I think finding intersting ways to incorporate these tools will be the challenge. With Picasa the students could make their own photo albums for a project and do a brief PowerPoint presentation to talk about it. I really like the idea of them collecting pictures for class because really a picture sometimes is worth 1,000 words. Plus it gives students a choice instead of locking them into one type of project or assignment. It makes them be creative, which is what I will have to do with my lessons so I can use all this stuff.