This is day seven in Brazil. We are in Triumfo, a city in the western part of the state. We started in Recife and have traveled west for two days. I have seen the beach, favelas, shipping ports, sugar refinaries, plantations, distillaries, resorts, cacti, marmosettes, and so much more. I have so much geographic information in my head that I will never remember. Luckily, I have also written a lot down and taken many pictures.

I am very amazed at how much is produced in Brazil. We rarely see anything that is made in China or the USA.

Tomorrow we will be visiting small farms and creating topographic vegitation maps.

Bom Noire

Brazil

I have just about finished packing for my trip to Recife, Brazil. I will be gone for two weeks and traveling with the Virginia Geographic Alliance. I hope to document as much of my trip as possible on this blog, whenever the Internet is available to us.

Fun with AEJEE

I have spent some time this weekend going through the lessons in the Help PDF that comes with AEJEE. It has been very helpful in explaining why certain tools are used. In the past, I have just followed directions for pre-made lesson plans or only used the basic tools that I felt most comfortable with. Lesson three is a lot of fun and will be useful. In this lesson I have learned how to create my own maps for use in lessons. It also will be a great tool for teaching my world geography students about different map projections and measurements on a two dimensional map. Great circle routes are demonstrated well with the measurement tool. I can't wait to start making more maps and exporting them to be used in slide shows or on test!

The work continues....

I have completed the script for one podcast that is a basic introduction to what GIS technology is and how it is useful in the K-12 classroom. It actually takes longer than you think to feel like you are covering the material in a way that someone else will understand. I have almost completed a second script for introductory use of My World GIS and it dawned on me that this one could be used by my students as well when they will first learn to use it.

I have also spent some time playing around with SnapZ Pro to make sure I can use it. I have not decided if I want to use it with voice recording or without. If I do it without, I would then record in GarageBand so I can export the file to my iTunes library. However, I am not sure I can even do that. I know I can with still shots, but I am not sure about video. That is a task for another day this week.

I went to a workshop at the RCPS Summer Technology Academy about using GarageBand to create podcasts. I had already had training on this, but I wanted to see if there was anything I didn't know, and there was. I learned about adding chapter titles and hotlinks to the podcasts as well as some reminders about copyright laws. This is the same academy where I will lead the GIS workshop later this month, but as of now only one person is registered.

I have not been keeping track of hours invested in this project, but I thought I should start. It is not clear if this is an expectation for the final project for the JMU Educational Technology degree, but it will not hurt. So, today I have spent about four hours even though it seems like I have accomplished nothing. I spent a lot of time working with copying data files into My World GIS and trying to figure out the easiest way to explain this to other teachers. I find data file locating to be one of the hardest parts of any GIS program, because the path to follow may be different for each end-user.

Starting a new project

O.K. It is time to start blogging again. I can now breath since my AP students have taken their exam and I feel they were ready even if they didn't know the CZM by the name Burgess. I'll know better next year, but most of them figured it out anyway.

Now it is time to really focus on my podcasts for my JMU Practicum project. I have been listening a little to other educational podcasts or watching video instructions on-line to get an idea of what others are doing. I have even joined The Teachers' Podcast group on Facebook. My first topics will be on GIS, since I will be doing a face-to-face PD session in July on this topic. I will hopefully be able to compare the two delivery formats.

I will probably use AEJEE software for these lessons because it is free, and available to all teachers in my school system. However, I want to work a little on My World GIS as well, since that is being bought for my school and I want to use that more with my students.

I have started with scripting my podcasts and the first one will be about what GIS is and why to use it in the classroom. If I decide to make the first one with images, I think I will just use screen shots from AEJEE and put them in GarageBand. Latter, when I make recordings of specific lesson skills, I'll use SnapZ Pro to capture screen activity.

It would be great to find out what others think of using podcasting as a tool for professional development within a school system.

Santa and Geography

You can track where Santa is traveling with this web site from Norad.
It allows you to view video and see it in 3-D by switching to Google Earth. Each stop has a link to let you learn more about the places he is visiting.
Merry Christmas to all!

Technology and Christmas

Saturday's DNR had an article about outsourcing your Christmas cards. Red Stamp is an online service that will take care of your correspondence needs. I think this is sad. Technology is great for many things, and turning over certain responsibilities to others makes good economic sense; however, the purpose of a personal correspondence is -- well-- personal. It would break my heart if my mother had someone else send me a card in her name.

Another tech article related to the Christmas season was that the Wii is the hot item for the year. I have played with my son's and it was fun. I hope this is a sign that parents are helping their children be more active even when playing video games. It is obvious that technology gifts are the trend for the year as many of the Black Friday specials were TVs, DVD players, MP3 players and digital picture frames. It makes me wonder what will the techno gifts be 10 years from now.