House Divided Weekend

I enjoyed all the events for the house divided weekend launch. I thought that all of th events were very successful espicially considering the weather. To me the most successful event was the film festival. I though that the differecnt combination of singing, and plying civil war time music, and the films made the festival different and added to the success. I though that as far as the films themselves were concerned all three were very well done. It showed the new kind of technology that we are working on here and how they can be used to help students learn. I though that the voice over process went incredibly well and I like that it was not always one voice. The films also looked more professional then I though they would look. My only critique of the films would be that sometimes, the captions that came up would be to small or would flash away too quickly before I had time to read them. Also sometimes I felt as though the videos would drag on a little to long. Its important to get your information to the audience but also do it in a way that does not drag out the point your trying to make. I also found the saturday morning teacher workshop to be useful. As someone who wants to be a teacher, I liked that after using most of the tools on House Divided I got to see how I could use them in a classroom setting. One thing that really stuck to me was when the explanation of word clouds came up, and a particular teacher said to any of the students who are education majors/minors using word clouds is great for ESL students. This spoke close to be as I am learning about how to make content more manageable for ESl students. So that connection he made was greatly appreciated.