Today we covered quite a bit of material. Please spend a few minutes reflecting on what we covered today and write about what you took away from our work today. What excites you about what you learned and what frustrates you…
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July 26, 2008 at 10:25 pm
I like the stuff I have learned today, but overwhelmed is an understatement! I am excited to set up a blog that my parents and students can look at. Although my typing class wont have much for me to put on it, it will be a good first try of setting it up for my coming years that will hopefully be spent as a math teacher. I am hoping to have time to experiment with this stuff in the near future or I will forget it. I get extremely frustrated when I can’t figure things out. Until I play with these tools I will be frustrated!
July 26, 2008 at 10:26 pm
The only thing that I am frustrated with is learning so much in such a short time. This material is exciting and seems useful. I think a blog will be very useful to me as a teacher. Parents will be able to have an idea as to the material we are covering, and students can stay up to date on assignments and projects. The wiki is something that I am less certain about. I can vaguely see that there are great possibilities, but I will need to explore it further before I will know exactly how to use it.
July 26, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Being able to create a wordpress site when there is a person right there to answer questions AND peers there to collaborate with was GREAT.
Learning about different websites and resourses – Very Valuable
RSS – Important, but I still don;t think I get it (my bad).
The article on wikipedia was helpful since it took the mystery out of it.
I am excited about a class website since I have now had a chance to try it out and see I can do it. I am also excited to learn about RSS, tags, etc since they will help us all manage the tools/sites, etc out there.
July 26, 2008 at 10:28 pm
For the most part I found today very exciting because it was a hands-on experience where I could start creating technology rich forums. It is one thing to say you want to have a class web page (blog or wiki). But, without the experience to help you build the skills it is pretty much lip service.
Even though I am excited to use the technology we learned about today, I really don’t find it that intuitive. So, there are many times that I get frustrated that I can’t figure out the next step. Yet, going through the process today helped me to build the skills so I feel like I could guess my way around when I do get stumped.
I also enjoyed learning about the features in Amazon, free E-books, and free bibliography sites. Very cool!
July 26, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I have never really been a technology person and don’t like to change how I am doing things. So learning all this new stuff and trying to figure out what is going on can be frustrating. But once I begin to understand more about how to use all this stuff on the computer I can see it being very beneficial. I like the wiki and how you can interact through that with your students and the blog is cool because it will help you give out more information for your students to read and even comment on. These things opens up more communication between yourself, students and students parents. I am going to be a P.E. teacher and having a blog with links to articles about staying healthy I could give to students. Having them post things that they see on the wiki. There are so many different things you can do with all this technology.
July 26, 2008 at 10:30 pm
I am excited about so much…I feel like I have learned a ton today about things I have been wanting to know more about for so long now. Unfortunately, what I am frustrated about is the fact that I fear I will forget most of what I learned today (and these past few weeks) before I get the chance to put it to good use.
I am so excited to create websites for my classes I will be teaching, and projects I will be starting in the fall, but I hope I get to it before I forget it!
This class is actually one I wish we had over the course of an entire semester because I feel that it is a subject that I had little to no previous knowledge of and one that could potentially have a tremendous impact on my teaching and on my students.
Regardless of our short time together, the most valuable thing I will take away from this class is a stronger sense of confidence that I CAN do this technology thing and it WILL WORK to benefit my classroom. It feels like the start of something great! At least now I am not completely terrified or clueless of what is out there and what is available to me as a teacher. Hooray!
July 26, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Wow, we sure did cover a lot of stuff today. Will I remember all of it? Ummm I hope so but I doubt it. I have never done a blog before so it was interesting to learn how to do that. I have seen a teacher use it and I think it worked out really well. If you can incorporate it into your teaching then I think it is an awesome thing to use. I like the wordpress program because it seems really user friendly and easy for a person just starting out to use. What frustrates me is that in my content area of PE, you really don’t see this kinda thing used much. I can see ways where I would and could use things like blogs but have not really seen it done in the past. I could see it being used as like an exercise log or diet log. Until I do some more research and do some talking with other teachers will I become less frustrated with applying it to the physical education part of my job. I think my frustration is just how a lot of things relate to my content area, not just this class but that has nothing to do with technology.
July 26, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I am very excited about what we have learned today…I think I just need some more time to let the things we talked about and did sink in. I am one of those people that needs to be able to play around with technology quite a bit once I have learned about it in order to retain it. So while I find the topics we covered very useful, I think that since we moved through trying a variety of things, I will definitely need to spend some time on my own going over what we did and making sure that I can still do the things we learned even when I am not in a classroom setting.
I think the biggest thing for me is that the blogs and wikis etc. are pretty user friendly, and very relevant to this day in age. It has been brought to my attention repeatedly that if topics or exercises are not relevant to students, then they are less apt to pay attention to them. Therefore, being able to incorporate technology into my classroom (technology that I can actually use consistently without taking away from time spent teaching) will be a very important asset.
July 26, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I like the idea of someone else such as WordPress handling all of the host issues for a web page and most of the design issues. This would make it much easier for me to use with students since my only part would be updating the webpage. However, even updating the page still adds something to the management burden, on top of the usual teacher tasks. Still, I think I like it well enough to try with the class that I’m currently teaching. It would give me someplace to put the homeworks so that when students miss class or misplace the homework, I can just send them to my webpage.
Finally, I liked not having to use HTML tags to create webpages, but I also found WordPress’ editing tools to be too limiting (no table tool, for example), so I frequently switched to editing the source.
July 26, 2008 at 10:33 pm
At the moment, I feel like we have indeed covered quite a bit of material and so it is hard to remember all of the specifics. Still, at the core of all of these new applications (wikipedia, blogs, etc), I believe there remains exciting opportunities for communication. As technology is becoming more necessary and more implicated into society, teachers need to find ways to tap into these assets. Prior to this class, I wasn’t prepared to use technology in tangible and modern ways. I personally find the wiki and blog ideas as comparable to ‘myspace’ and ‘facebook’ for our students. Consequently, I am excited to use this as a way of communicating with my students in a way that they are already familiar with.
Another aspect that I am excited about with these applications, is that it is easily accessible to students and their parents regardless of their location. I need to remember to bring awareness to my students about such sites from the beginning of the school year. I believe it will be beneficial to have them do activities using these applications at the beginning of the year (so they can use it effectively).
August 8, 2008 at 10:25 pm
We have covered so much in class I know that I will not remember it. However, I have good notes and know I will be referring to it often and frequently in the future.
I think it is exciting that there are options for the average person to setup wickis and blogs to communicate globally. I also am excited to have discoverd several sites that can assist me in designing lesson activities to empower students of the internet as a communication tool.