Garage Band

We started working with Garage Band, creating podcasts. This seems like a great way to create an informational presentation for almost any topic. You can even include music, sounds, or your own voice. I had never really worked with podcasts before, but I can see how they would be really useful, especially for older students. A lot of information can be communicated fairly easily and can be saved and mobilized for later use.
I was impressed with how user-friendly Garage Band was. I was totally new to the program and podcasting in general, and I ended up being able to create my own podcast right away. I liked it because you can create a really simple podcast, or add as much to it as you like. Also, once I got familiar with the program, it didn't take long to make quite a bit of progress on my project.
For classroom use, I feel that this would be very useful for high school and college students. If teachers and professors had class lectures or information available in this format, students could easily catch up after missing a class. It could also be a good study tool, reviewing before a test. For other teachers, I think podcasts are useful in accessing new education information on the web. iTunes has a lot of free podcasts available, making it easy and inexpensive to share information with other educators.

Exploring Google

This week we explored search engines to learn more about what different sites can offer. We mainly focused on Google, the most popular search engine. Beyond learning about how to effectively search for particular terms, we also explored other special features that Google offers. There are applications that allow anything from translating phrases and websites, to searching blogs by topic.

In the classroom, a sound knowledge of Google would really help in teaching students how to conduct research on the web. Not only can you find tips on how to narrow your search to find something that is specific to what you want, but you can also use tools to supplement research.

We also looked at hoax websites and how to indicators of false information. This will be really helpful in showing students how to locate reliable sources on the web, and not accept every site as truth. This is an increasingly important part of research education because pretty much anyone can create a reliable looking website.