Year in review

Well as it turns out I cant stay away from the blogs for very long. I felt I should elaborate on what I learned this semester and give you an idea of where I'm at. For the most part, I wish I was still in the field, or that we could student teach for a longer period of time and spend less time at the university. I just feel our time would be better spent in the field with the students. One thing I really enjoy are my classmates. We all seem to get along and work well together which makes the long days at school go by much easier. As far as classes go, ICT and Professional Teacher have been my favorite courses. ICT as given us many tools to use in the classroom. PT has also given us tons of info on the legal issues that go along with teaching.

I think the role of technology will only get bigger as time goes on. At some point, text books will be gone, students will have iPads of some kind with all the work on it and teachers will email students the handouts rather than give them hard copies.

As much as I like using technology in the class, we have to make sure students still get the face to face interaction with each other. It is a shame that that is something we may have to teach students at some point when in the past it just happened on its own through...living and working, I guess. That sounds really sad, actually.

I do like how we can use technology in classes like English and History by using blogs, websites and other things to get kids interested in writing and sharing information. since kids use communications sites like Facebook and twitter all the time anyway, we should get them using it for school as well.

As far at technology goes, I still have a lot to learn. I'm not that engaged with tech to the point of keeping up with the youth of today. Perhaps I should make a twitter account? we shall see....

Here is a little slide show I made using animoto...its really cool for making short videos...

Year in review

Other cool things to use in class are things like audacity for making pod casts, which I have actually used in a class when giving a presentation while talking about technology and how we can use it when differentiating lesson plans. I also liked using glogster which is really cool for accommodating presentations.

Thanks again, and see you soon!