- Describe your thoughts on using technology (i.e. eBook creator, the website, and translator) to help you work with non-English speaking future students. Don’t just say it was great…provide details to these items. A) Describe the strengths and B) Describe the challenges.
- Using technology brought a lot of advantages and assistance in communicating with people on the other side of the world. Without the internet, communicating with the students in Italy would be very challenging because we would only be able to sent letters back and forth. Through the internet we are able to communicate with them instantly and use a translator to communicate with them in their native language.
- The challenges would be that there was some difficulty saving my ebook in all the appropriate formats, however in the end it got done. Also, having used the google translator before, I know that it’s translations are not always very clear. I have tried to translate sections of text of foreign languages before and gotten very confusing English translations. A lot of the time I cannot even guess what the text is trying to communicate. I do not know how well it worked for the Italian students, but I am hoping that they were able to understand our comments.
- Describe your thoughts on the quality of your eBook as it compared to your Italian middle school students....disregard the fact that you may not be able to read the Iitalian.
The students’ books were really well done in my opinion. I could not read the Italian or have it translated, but the photographs were really good. There was some formatting that I though could have been done better. For example, some books only included text, I always try to supplement my text with an image that relates to it. After reevaluating my book I wish that I would have formatted it a little more neatly. At times it looked a little cluttered and slightly confusing. The Italian students mainly wrote in prose, so maybe I should have written in that style more. Again, I want to state that their images were of such wonderful quality. It was really impressive to me as a slightly experience amateur photographer, myself.
- Describe another way you could use student eBook publishing to support learning for your future students.i.e. How else could you use iBooks Author – (or some other eBook publishing tool) to support learning of some content.Be specific…provide an example!
There are a million different ways that I could use the ebook to further student learning. Anytime I want my students to demonstrate their understanding in writing and/or visuals I could use the ebook. Students could use it to “publish” their writing and at the end of the year have a comprehensive portfolio. If my students wanted to inform me about some topic, they could create an informational ebook. If they wrote a story, they could type it into an ebook to create a more palatable presentation. If I was doing a unit on photography they could create an electronic portfolio with ebook.
- Describe your thoughts on this specific learning experience.i.e. What did you like about it? What would you change? etc.
Overall I enjoyed learning how to use ebook, learning about a city on the other side of the World, and communicating with Italian students. However, there were a couple of things that I would change about the project. I was disappointed that I was not able to copy and paste the Italian text into the translator, so that I could read the students’ books. I’m not sure if there is a way that this can happen, but it would be really great if we were able to translate their books. I would also love it if we could have actual conversations with the students, rather than just posting a comment. I would love to have a kind of pen-pal-like relationship with one or a couple of the students. I would be willing and happy to do this and I’m sure other students would too.
5. Pictures
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