Blog Post #9: Project 3 Proposal

Target Audience: 10th Grade Health Students
Technology: Outbreak at the Water's Edge
Learning Activities: Outbreak at the Water's Edge is an interactive game made by the University of Minnesota that teaches some how the basics of epidemiology. I will make a tutorial of how to play the game and then require my students to play the game at home and bring me a list of things they learned, what the cause of the disease was, where the cause was coming from, and what contributed to it.

Project #2: Instructional Video

Blog Post #8: Asynchronous Video

Blog Post #7: Synchronous Chat/Video

For my synchronous video experience I used Google Talk/Video and Video chatted with my husband who is on an internship in Colorado right now. We have actually been familiar with "web-caming" as we call it for quite some time. My husband, Jon, bought me a web cam when we first started long distance dating between Provo and Rexburg. We used it to help us not miss each other quite as much with the distance for a year while we were dating long distance. That is one of my favorite features of the video chatting experience. Being able to see the face of the person you are talking to helps to make it feel like they are closer than they really are. You also have a visual picture which makes things a lot nicer. The difficulties we have experienced are that, depending on internet speed, there are sometimes disruptions in the chat stream or echos in the background. Also sometimes the microphone part won't work unless we hook everything up in a certain order.

I think there are plenty of ways that video chat can be used in education. For instance, in highschool I actually took 3 different college courses from Utah State that were through Synchronous Video. The Professor broadcasted from Utah State and we could watch him on a video in our school in Idaho and respond to him through microphones- kind of like it was a normal class. Also, it could be a way to get in touch with students or to have home visits with their parents without having to actually drive to everyone's houses.