Film in Progress

Well, I'm working on another film for school. Good thing I married a man who knows how to edit video! So, I decided to edit my video with the program we have on our home computer, Sony Vegas. My film will be an example of a possible outcome for a student assignment. It fulfills this Utah core curriculum Standard for fifth grade dance "The student will understand and demonstrate dance in relation to its historical, cultural, and personal origins." More particularly, it fulfills an Objective underneath that standard, "Perform and understand dances from different time periods and cultures". As fifth graders are learning about the turn of the 20th century and world war II when social dance was incredibly popular in America, the assignment bridges both dance and Social Studies curriculum. For my project example, I have a story board that shows how I will first tell the history of the Charleston dance through stills and narration, then I will demonstrate it step-by-step, teaching the viewer how to dance the Charleston!

The hardest part about this video has been finding pictures that are fair use and un-copyright protected. But it should be fun and I enjoy editing video!

Here is my story board:





Lovely huh? I'll be impressed if you can actually read my chicken scratch! But I've spent about 2 hours on the whole project so far. It should be fun!

Classroom Website

Well here it is! My awesome classroom website. I had trouble with embedding an iframe. I tried several websites and they all came up as errors... I'm not sure what I did wrong!

http://sites.google.com/site/mrscravathsclassroomwebsite/home

Google Wave

Class Websites

Although it was difficult for me to figure out exactly how to make one work, I really like the idea of a class website. Instead of sending home several reminders and class newsletters that are very likely to get lost before they ever reach the parents, you can just send one home not that emphasizes the importance of checking the classroom website daily. Then you can post reminders, calenders, and assignments. I know it could be a challenge with those parents who don't have a computer or internet at home, so I'm not sure how to overcome that challenge yet. But internet is becoming more and more commonplace.

I really love the idea of a calendar on the website to keep both me and my students organized and updated. I can also post ideas on where students can go to research for projects and to give them ideas on how to get started. Finally, it would be an easy way for parents to reach me, as they can just email me through the website, instead of keeping track of my email. Then, I can avoid getting too many parent phone calls as well! I think this can be a great tool in the future for disseminating information to both students and teachers.

Blogging and Teaching

Funny how I've always though of dance as a way to get kids up and out of their desks, off the computer, and moving, yet now I'm in a class to teach my how to incorporate technology into my dance education techniques. Lol. Yet I do see some good out of it. First of all, finding videos of dances on youtube is a constant assignment I have and could benefit my future students. Putting those videos onto my blog would make it a lot easier for them to find exactly what I want them to view. In addition, I can keep parents updated on assignments without destroying a million trees and using up unnecessary ink. So as an environmental tool, blogging is great! I could also post assigned readings on my blog so that the students can read there instead of printing those out as well.

RSS feeds are also useful for me as an educator. To stay current on what the dance world is doing, I can subscribe to several dance blogs and websites instead of having to re-find them all and check them. I like google reader for this, but I still feel like it is a different experience to go and visit the actual website, and I don't like to give that up. However, a couple good feeds I subscribed to are:

www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/blog
www.dancingperfectlyfree.com

I think that a blog could also be incredibly useful for fellow educators who want to add dance to their curriculum. I could post lesson plans for all to see and share, so that someone who stumbled across my blog from New York or Florida could try adding dance to their curriculum.

Dance on Film as Art

I made this movie for my dance and technology class. The little girl choreographed almost the whole thing!

Chinese dancers

I love this dance!