Weekly Reflection & Report #10

Hello Bloggers!

Have any of you ever used Animoto, Fotobable, Prezi, or any of the other tools before this week? Well, I have not! This week was my first time exploring beyond Microsoft PowerPoint. Slideshows are something that I've always loved creating for school projects. I think that they are an effective and even fun way to present information! Incorporating effects into slideshows can make them that much more appealing to your audience.

Timothy Gu. (2012) Prezi logo transparent 2012 [Online image]
Retrieved from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prezi_logo_transparent_2012.svg    

Prezi is a tool that I have heard of before and even have seen presentations that used this tool, but I have never created my own presentation with it. It is an awesome tool! I really enjoyed the theme that Prezi incorporates into their slideshows but still allowing you the ability to customize them. I was able to sort of intertwine the different pages of my presentation and have them follow a customized path. Prezi allowed me to incorporate enough text so that I could present information. This is why I chose this tool to create my digital citizenship and copyrights presentation. 

Fotobabble allows you to incorporate, babble! This tool allows you to create slideshows with speech. This tool was fun to explore because we just discussed the importance of our voice in week 9 and how voice threads can contribute to our learning. Still, I am not a big fan of using voice in a digital environment so this tool wasn't a favourite of mine.

Animoto was simple to use and had so many different themes that you could choose from. The theme choices were even categorized by things like business, education, photography, etc.  Now, I did noticed that this tool focused much more on video and photo content rather than text unlike Prezi. This tool also suggests right away to incorporate a song into your presentation and gives you a variety of songs to choose from their personal library. I can see myself using this tool for more personal reasons like photograph slideshows. Or, for educational activities that require the use of video or many pictures and minimal text description.

Additionally, this week I also learned how to search for copyright free images. I used Googles advanced search to locate these images so that I could include them in my slideshow I created. Seeing as I have never used Google's advanced search before, this video Google's Advanced Image Search that was provided to me in the online module was very helpful. It clearly showed me what to click to find copyright free images! I never use to think about citing images I used in presentations but now I've learned that you have to just as much as you have to cite your text.

On a side note, I had the opportunity to read the article Should Everyone Learn at Least One Other Language. The introduction of this article had me thinking. It mentions all the translation apps we have available to us today with technology. Yet another part of the digital world! Personally, I only speak English and I am privileged that this language is widely known across the world, but learning another language has always intrigued me. In elementary and high school I learned the basics of the French language but it never really stuck with me. Someday I do hope to learn another language and not solely rely on translation apps! What are your thoughts on this article? To relate to this course, do you think that the digital world is preventing us from being motivated to expand our capabilities of speaking another language? Are we becoming lazy and solely relying on translation apps?