Finished!

I'm finally finished with the IIC competition! What a relief. I'm glad I decided to participate in the competition, but I am also glad that it is no longer hanging over my head. I had awesome group members, and we worked really well together. We worked hard and long, especially on our video, but now we have something to be proud of.

Check out our video pitch about using Diigo and Mindmeister to teach the persuasive essay.

My Storyboard

It was a little difficult getting pictures for the storyboard because most of the video (for the competition) will be our group explaining what we have done for our submission. I am hoping that we can make our video pitch more interesting with relevant pictures, and I think it will be helpful to show how we are actually using technology by including a demonstration in the video.

I have posted my storyboard to google docs.

We are still working out a few details, so the script will change a little bit. This is a good overview of what will be in our video, and we will smooth everything out in the next couple of days.

Weekly Participation

I have not completed my copyright assignment yet because I have been working on my project for the competition.

However, I have still been participating in learning new technology. For another class, I am starting to learn Photoshop. I've always been terrified of working with Photoshop, and even more so after I tried to learn it last semester and failed miserably.

This semester, I am learning it better, but I am still a beginner. Here is a before and after picture (but like I said, I am still learning, so the photograph has not been fixed as well as other people could have done it--but it's a good start for me).

My Artifact (Technology Lesson Plan)

I set up a Diigo account for myself so that I could do my own lesson plan from a student's point of view. I chose an example persuasive essay and used Diigo to mark specific points in an article. I used the sticky notes to identify the thesis, the main topics for each paragraph, and the opposing argument according to the handout that was mentioned in my last blog post (my lesson plan).

I am participating in the McKay School competition, so I will continue to develop my lesson plan. As I mentioned in my blog post about my lesson plan proposal, I will also be using mind mapping to teach persuasive writing. My lesson plan uses Diigo to introduce the mini unit on persuasive writing. This first lesson plan requires students to do something similar to this assignment. Later lessons will require students to use mind mapping in the ways I mentioned previously.

Here are some screen shots of my Diigo page.