Photovisi for a Spanish Classroom

Hola clase!

After thoroughly examining a number of Web 2.0 tools that are offered, I chose Photovisi to create my collage promoting its use. I began using Picasa but I found it rather complicated, so I continued my search for an easier tool until I found Photovisi. It was very easy to find a template for my collage and also to add items such as text and pictures.

I found Photovisi extremely easy and fun to use when creating posters or collages. I would definitely use this collage maker to create beautiful, “eye candy” posters to enhance learning in my future Spanish classrooms.  I also believe this could be a powerful tool for my students when they have to do presentations. They would be able to make a poster electronically and display it during their presentation using a smart board, instead of having to do it by hand. I feel students would find this much more convenient and fun.

My poster is aimed at two different audiences, teachers and students.  It shows teachers how useful a tool like Photovisi can be, and how they can use it to enhance their classroom and provide information to their students.  I did this through the use of a colorful display and cultural significant pictures to Spanish speaking countries.  I also included a map of South America which can help students learn geography.  The poster not only shows students this information, but helps bring the classroom some color and excitement.  It would also show them that I care about having a fun learning environment.

Here is the website to Photovisi. Enjoy! 

My First iGoogle Experience

Today was my first time experiencing iGoogle, and I absolutely loved it. I was acquainted with some of the tools Google offers such as Google images, Google maps, Google search to name a few. However, I have never heard of iGoogle before. I first thought it was going to be very difficult to set up.  I watched the mini product tour video that was on the site and it did an excellent job explaining how to use iGoogle.  Afterwards, I set up my site with relative ease.  I added a number of gadgets as iGoogle calls them, that are links to some of my favorite web information that I frequently look into.  These include some news, the weather, Facebook, cooking recipes, and other sites with my interests.  It was also very easy to set up my theme and there was a large variety of choices.  The reason I loved it so much is that it is very convenient to have my own start page where all of my preferred sites and web information are located.  While I was setting up my page, I found it very exciting to search through all of the gadgets that my personalized page could have.  

I used Faststone Capture to get the screenshot of my iGoogle page.  It was a very easy program to use.  I used the scroll-down version of the program and it took an image of the entire page.

 Here is a snap shot of my page and the link to it is here.  Enjoy and start your iGoogle page soon!

Draft Teaching with Technology Philosophy - A Work in Progress

Hi everyone!

I began working on my philosophy, this is what I have so far:

"I want my students to learn life and technological skills required to achieve success as future adults, and prepare them with the best academic knowledge and technology tools to positively contribute to society"