Enhancing Literacy: Final Reflections

I just want to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed this class. I have met a lot of great educators/students that I hope I'll stay in contact with throughout this program, and maybe even beyond. This is a great, talented group. Thanks to Mrs. Blanco as well for her help and leadership.

I guess if I had to make a suggestion for improving the course, it would be more integration between the projects we worked on and the books we read. Although I read almost all of the readings, it seems like I could have completed the projects and the paper without doing any of the reading (although it would have been more difficult).

Having said that, I really liked the activities/projects we did in this class. Especially the Infographic. That was really fun to do and something I'll be able to use down the road. Overall, a very educational class and a great start to what will surely be a fantastic program. Good luck to everyone. See you next class!

Civil War Infographic

Once again, I struggled over the weekend with web-based tools. I simply could not find a program -- for free -- that I could figure out, use easily and be satisfied with the product. Eventually I used a program I'm more familiar with, but isn't based on Web 2.0 technology. That program was Microsoft Publisher. I wanted to produce a document with links to various web sites, so students could easily go to the source to learn more about a subject. Since I could only post a picture here, and not a web-based document, those links are not active on this picture. But they are there. Hopefully this will be sufficient to my classmates.

It would have been nice to have a little more room, but with what I was working with my best option was to choose 11x17 format. I would hope to use this infographic in a high school Social Studies classroom. Now that it's done, it's possible, I hope, to move all of the graphics and information into a web-based program. Otherwise, the students would have to have MS Office in order to use the links. At least I think that's the case. Still, the PDF version of this document allows for linking.

A Digital Story

Photo Credits:

Crowd pic: http://www.september11news.com/news/

Shanksville pic: http://wizbangblog.com/?p=44402

Memorials: http://www.obit-mag.com/articles/elegy-for-st-vincents

Muslim relations: http://shanebertou.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/christian-muslim-relations-in-a-post-911-world/