Final Blog Post

I was excited about several of the projects we did during this semester. My favorite being the Comments4Kids project. I was inspired by kids use of technology. I am planning on teach my daughter and her cousins to use Skype to stay in touch with each other, versus running up my phone bill. I was also excited about making my podcast, even though I ended up doing it by myself . It wasn’t the best , but not bad for my first try. What excites me about the podcast and videocasts is I can see using them on a class web page and/or blog with my future students to help them keep up with class if they have to be out, or to go back a review for a test. Audacity was great to work with, I even used it to record myself reading my daughters favorite book , so she can listen to it at bedtime while I am at work. Before this class I hadn’t really ever used YouTube so, that is a great resource tool that I have gained . My husband and mother are both computer programmers so, spreadsheets and databases I’ve used before, but I hadn’t used Google Docs before this class, but it does make the information on accessible. Itunes and ItunesU were another resource site that I hadn’t ever used prior to this class, and I was impressed with the amount of podcast were available for download. Picasa has been wonderful to use, my husband is a camera nut, so I have 200 pictures of our daughter , not including all the other pictures he’s taken . Picasa has made it easier to sort them, and decide which ones to keep. The Comments4Teachers project was informative, I really enjoyed reading the blog sites At the Teacher’s Desk and Bits and Bytes. The Personal Learning Network project is a little bit more of a problem for me since I don’t get to send a lot of time on the computer right now, but I am working on it. I love meeting and talking to new people, I do everyday at work, but for some reason I have a harder time making connection on line. I join some groups on Classroom 2.0 and twitter. I hope by the time I’m ready to enter the classroom to teach I will have a solid PLN set up. I’m not sure want you can add to this class, but if there is something out there Dr. Strange will find it. I don’t thing there is anything that was taught during this class that should be forgotten; some of the subjects might apply to some more then others, but all knowledge is good to have, you never know when you might needed it.
Dr. Strange you asked if there was anything we would change, so I’ll tell you what I think. I think that this course would better serve us future teacher if it we were required to take it closer to the time when we start student teaching. The reason I say this is that technology is constantly changing and by the time we start teaching in 2 to 3 years a lot of what we learned will be outdated. I know you want all of us to keep learning alone, with and from others, but realistically how many of your former students keep a blog today.
Ok, next thing I would change would be the student should have the option of taking this class as a real hands on class, or the hybrid or online version. I would really like to be able to take this class as a hands on in, lab room type setting , like Dr. Christie’s Class. I don’t register for online classes unless the class isn’t offered any other way, I have too many distraction at home. I wouldn’t say that the workload is too much, but I would say that it is easy to be overwhelmed with all of it, if you let it. I would say that I am at a medium level of technological literacy. My plan to improve my technological literacy is to try spend more time on line reading blog, and hopefully building my PLN, and playing around with the tools I’ve learned to see how I can incorporate them into the classroom.