Please respond by Sunday the 29th..
After the readings and our first class, what is something in your practice that needs to change. Is there something that we did or read that sparked something in you.. and made you think - I could be doing something different that would make me more effective in my job, my life, or my role as a student?
Share a little insight about what sparked your interest and share any brainstorming or insights you might be grappling with about how technology is used in learning or for productivity and admistrative tasks.
4 comments:
After the first weekend class, I do learned lots of advanced technologies and I am really happy that I enrolled this course as what I learned is pretty practical and can be applied in my teaching immediately. And, the most impressive technology I learned are Wiki and Google reader (RSS feeds). First, using Wiki to build a course or personal page and using relevant links are pretty neat tools, which can connect classmates and offer a good stage for the classmates to discuss and learn from each other. Second, the Google Read also allows students as well as teachers to follow their interesting material easily. I do like these kind of technology and would like to use it in my class. I will try to build a wiki for my class and upload some useful course learning material for my students to follow and update their learning resources to facilitate their learning. I think it may be a little difficult for me to apply all the technology learned from this course. However, as long as I pay more attention to apply technology in my teaching and would like to be more creative to use technology, my class would be more and more effective and interesting. Thanks
Thanks a lot for providing this wonderful course!!
In the reading: “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” it was theorized that we as teachers need to “reconsider both our methodology and our content.” In dealing with content, they described the importance of teaching “Legacy” content, which is basic skills, as well as “Future” content which is the use of technology. The author also talked about “learning new ways to do old stuff,” and encouraged teachers to rethink their presentation of material for students in a way that is very natural to them. This writer made a lot of sense to me.
After our first class, and after working on my WIKI, I realized that I have procrastinated for way too long in bringing technology into my classroom. I have had at my disposal the internet, yet have not created a web page for parents and students to access. I have found the most interesting websites in my quest to complete my WIKI site, and I have already begun using them in my classroom. Two sites that my students have enjoyed using are a timekeeper site as well as a simple dictionary tool.
The timekeeper site has a variety of different timers, including an egg timer, rocket, and bomb. I sometimes use a timer to challenge students to complete work within an amount of time as a tool to keep them on task. I did however find out that certain timers (the bomb) didn’t work well, because students were watching for the bomb to explode rather than stay on task.
On Mondays, when we are reviewing vocabulary for the new weekly story, we sometimes complete vocabulary activities. These include: looking up a word, finding a synonym and/or antonym, finding “snazzy” words that mean the same thing, drawing a picture of the word, and then use the word in a sentence. The dictionary site made the procedure easier and student interest was higher. After looking up the word, students can also access a Thesaurus. I’ve only used it once, (whole group) but intend on using it as a center on Monday. Students will use the site independently.
My interest was sparked by the idea of using Twitter in my classroom. I can’t wait to see how we will do this.
I haven’t felt this out of it or wowed in a long time! After the first weekend of our class I have been overcome by the amount of technology and information that I have truly been blind too!
In my 20 plus years of experience in education I have always prided myself as being computer “literate”, but after this first weekend class I realize that even though I feel very comfortable in front of the computer and am quite adept in using most office or productivity software, I am now behind and even lost when it comes to “Wikispaces”; “Twitter”; “BlogSpot”; “Doodle”; and probably so much more.
So what our class has sparked is something between bewilderment, a little fear, and a desire to learn even more of this future technological magic! My eyes have been opened to the fact that I could be communicating in new ways with my staff at school, and there are programs out there to help me adapt to a more organized existence.
I hate to admit this, but it’s taken nearly a week and a half for me to finally get all of these new websites under control where I can merge information, find out what our assignments are, and be able to answer them. The funny thing is even now I am writing this response in Microsoft Word where I can check everything then copy and paste it to my Blog! So this is now the second or maybe third time in my life that I have written a Blog! Go figure!
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