I sincerely enjoyed taking teaching with technology. It was a great deal of work. It was quite frustrating at times. It was also very time consuming. However, I learned so much. Collaborating and collaboration took on a whole new meaning through taking this course. I learned that I could do so many of the things that I only dreamed of doing. I often was afraid to try new things on the various websites in fear of getting a computer virus or someone stealing my personal information. I took a leap of faith. Because I trusted Dr. Smirnova, I knew that she would not suggest a site that had been known for viruses. Below I have touched upon a few key aspects of the class.
• Group Assignments: I loved the group assignments most of all. I liked that fact that we had to all do our own assignments and do a related assignment with our group. I found it helpful to have group meetings every other week from class meetings. First, we always found a time that worked for all of us, and it usually was not on a Monday evening. Friday evenings seemed to be a popular time to meet because we all didn’t have the pressure of having to be at work by 7 A.M. the next morning. Second, we often discussed our individual projects, which added to our learning experience. We would often share the product of our individual assignments during our group meetings and receive instant feedback from our group members. We would also discuss how we were going to each tackle the up coming individual projects as well. I feel that I learned a great deal from my group members.
•Digital Stories: I loved learning how to make educational movies.
o Math: I plan on creating math movies. You know the math teachers often feel that they would like to pop in a movie that relates to their topic like the science, social studies, and English teachers can. However, you really cannot find many movies pertaining to math that are educational and entertaining (just clips from movies). Therefore, it is my mission to create at least a few math movies that I can show to my future classes. I believe that I could not create a math movie that would hold the student’s attention for the entire class period. However, a fifteen minute movie with possibly a SMART Board activity to follow is something that I will attempt.
o Religious Education: During the course of the semester, I created a movie (digital story project) that I plan on showing to my religious education students. I created a story about Abraham (Old Testament – “Father Abraham”) and I plan on creating more Biblical stories as teaching tools. There are many visual learners. Therefore, creating visuals to go along with what you are verbalizing is a plus, especially for my first grade religious education class.
• Creativity: As a former Day Cay operator, I love creating. The children that came to my home always left with some type of creation for the day. Creativity is something that I want to incorporate into my classroom as well. Among the sites and tools that I have learned about this semester, I loved working with Gloster, Smile Box, Microsoft Windows Movie Maker, Slide Share, Webspiration, Google Documents and Voice Thread to name a few. I loved the creative aspects of those sites and tools. Furthermore, the reason why I mentioned the sites and tools that I did was because I found them easy to use. If I found them easy, most anyone would too. The best part is that I didn’t have to spend money. Twitter is a little frustrating because you are only allowed so many characters per post.
• Collaboration: Among all the tools and sites that were used, I found the collaborative tools and sites to be of most interest. I plan on incorporating many of the collaborative tools in my classroom. I have found that I had learned a deal through collaborating with my group members. We had collaborated through several mediums. Google Chat, Google Documents, G-mail (Google e-mail system), PBwiki, Webspiration, WebIQ, WebEx, and Voice Thread were among the most popular and my favorite collaborative sites and tools. When working on various group projects, we communicated via g-mails, g-chat, posting work to the Google documents and to the PB Wiki. We were all contributing to the assignment and Google Documents and PB Wiki were the places where we could view the work in progress, and where g-chat and g-mail were the mediums where we communicated our thoughts and suggestions in between meeting on WebIQ. While on WebIQ, we could upload something that we wanted to share or work on collaboratively. The facilitator of the meeting could allow the other members of the meeting access to the pen. There were times when we when we were all writing and working at the same time on that site. We sometimes had a problem with wanting to work on the same page, but a different area. The entire page would move before you. When that happened, we moved to Google Documents, where we could all work simultaneously and still hear each other and communicate on WebIQ.
• Communication: Of course there are blogs and twitter. Blogs are great for posting interesting information that you know or learned and want to share. I like the fact that you can post a picture, slide show, collage, or even a movie to your blog page. I plan on continuing to post work, pictures, and movies to my blog site well after this semester is over. Twitter was okay. I didn’t like the fact that you were only allowed a set amount of characters at a time. However, that is a feature that I’m sure others love about the site.
• Personal Growth: I am very excited by the fact that during the course of this semester, I actually created three websites. My PB Wiki is the site where I posted the majority of my work. I posted my interests, assignments, and personal facts about myself. I was careful to always create a link back to my PB Wiki home page. I also continued to work on the teacher tool kit long after the assignment was completed by my group. Each time that I found an interesting, helpful, or resourceful site, I posted it to the appropriate section of my group’s tool kit. Aside from the PB Wiki site, we were asked to create another website of our own. I found this site to be complicated to use. Through the attending some of the on-line meetings, I heard about Weebly. I decided to try it. I found it easy to use. This site is still a work in progress for me. In my studies for this course, I got a lot of great ideas from others. I plan on transforming my Weebly site into a great educational site that others will come to. This site, however, is still in its infancy state. In the future I will create a website for my students, where I will post assignments, class presentation, and podcasts. I have learned so much, and I plan on continuing to grow and learn.
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