Blog Response Inventory

Date of response: September 7, 2009
Blog Author: Matt Ward
Blog Title: BLOG 1
Date of blog entry: August 31, 2009

Date of response: September 21, 2009
Blog Author: Jose Lugo
Blog Title: BLOG 2
Date of blog entry: September 12, 2009

Date of response: October 5, 2009
Blog Author: Tim Jones
Blog Title: BLOG 3
Date of blog entry: September 28, 2009

Date of response: October 19, 2009
Blog Author: Chris Lambert
Blog Title: BLOG 4
Date of blog entry: October 12, 2009

Date of response: November 2, 2009
Blog Author: Matt Ligon
Blog Title: BLOG 5
Date of blog entry: October 31, 2009

Date of response: November 16, 2009
Blog Author: Chris Simpson
Blog Title: BLOG 6
Date of blog entry: November 9, 2009

Date of response: November 30, 2009
Blog Author: Elizabeth Martin
Blog Title: BLOG 7
Date of blog entry: November 27, 2009

BLOG 7

This is the final blog of the semester. This past week was the final week for the Lowman Home workshops. They had a party for all the participants, but unfortunately I wasn't able to make it. We also spent the past few weeks talking about virtual high schools. We had a class discussion online about it. I think that virtual high schools could definitely be helpful with some classes but you just miss so much of the social aspect of high school if you were to take all of your courses online. We had a couple of speakers that came to class today to talk about it. One of the things they said they do for the social aspect of school is they have an online room that allows the students to create avatars and go around and talk to different people. That's fine and everything, but there is absolutely no way an avatar can take the place of actual socialization face to face. To me a total online high school will not have the students ready for any type of social situation in the real world. We also worked with CamStudio this week. We had to pick an objective off of a wiki website some other students created and create instructional videos and upload them on to a website such as Youtube. This was my first time creating a video on the computer so it was really a learning experience for me. To be honest it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be though. CamStudio was very easy to understand and I got my video done relatively quickly.

BLOG 6

Another couple of weeks have gone by. We recently presented our workshop on Google Tools. I thought the presentation went very well. We chose to do the presentation on Google Books, Google Maps and Youtube. We had 6 people show up. It wasn't a full class, but still a good number of people. For Google books we basically just had them look up The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to allow them to see a full scanned version of the book online. Many of them really seemed to enjoy this because not only can you look up books online but also magazines. For Google Maps we just had them type in Heritage at Lowman just so they could see some of the features of the application. We also showed them the street view which a lot of them found very cool. The last thing we showed them was Youtube. We actually found a video of another event at the Heritage uploaded on there so we had them search for that video. A few of the audience members were actually in the video so they enjoyed that. Last week another group presented a workshop on OpenOffice Writer and the last group goes this week presenting Calc. I think all of the groups have done a great job so far and hopefully we can finish strong.