Things We Have Covered in Class Summary Post

I consider myself to be in a unique situation as a student in this course. As a student who is already teaching in the classroom, I think my perspective of things is slightly different than my classmates. Teaching in a 2nd grade classroom currently, I tried to tune myself in to the things that I found most useful to me in the course. Since I graduated from college in 1993, most of the information in this course was not available to me at that time. It is amazing to think of how things have changed in a relatively short amount of time.

1)Our class blogs gave me a chance to think about my feelings on each subject. I was able to post my thoughts and feelings on each subject without worry of judgement. I did have strong feelings about Google docs, I hated them! Although I like the premise behind google docs, actually producing material on the website was frustrating to say the least. The collaboration aspect is nice one though. I was never an active Twitter user before this course. I'm an avid Facebook fan, but I still find twitter leaves me uncertain of my purpose there. My experience with podcasting was a good experience for me. As always I enjoy working in a group each time the opportunity presents itself. iTunes University was a new concept for me. I had not previously had experience with it before. I think it is particularly useful to high school students or college students. ACCESS is also a great opportunity for our high school students. ACCESS can save our states a lot of money by allowing them to listen to someone directly, instead of having an individual teacher at each school to do handle each subject. ALEX appears to be a great resource to Alabama teachers. Although we touched on many of the items listed in #1, I don’t know that I could speak in an educated manner about all of them. But I do feel as if I have enough knowledge to decide what I would like to use in my classroom. My mind has been changed in many ways about the use of some of them in the classroom. I was not in favor of using facebook in the classroom, but now I see where it could have some positive points to it. I would love to Skype with another 2nd grade classroom in the near future. We as educators have our own work cut out for us in our school systems. Trying to convince our principals and technology managers that we should have access to these programs on our school computers will be a difficult challenge!

#2. I felt as if we covered many different topics in class. I’m not sure what I expected to get from this class, so it’s difficult to say if there was something else I wish we had covered. I do know that many of the items/ideas we covered in class caused me to think about the changes that are occurring in education because of technology. It will be amazing to think and see where technology will take us in the near future.

#3. The assignments that we had to do in Google were probably the most difficult for me. The frustration I felt trying to create those made me not appreciate Google! Of course in all honesty the fact the instructions for the assignment were not the best did not help. There were instructions to highlight every other line gray, well guess what; you can’t do that in Google without manually doing each line separately. You can do it in PowerPoint, but not Google. Nice to know after you have wasted an hour in your life trying to figure that out! The directions for the assignment need to be reworked in my opinion.

#4. I’m excited about the prospects offered to my classroom from some of the things that we learned. I love the thought of a classroom blog. I’m excited about the fact that almost everything we learned to use in class was free! School systems do not have any extra funds to work with at this point. I can’t recall that anything we learned had an additional cost to it. My biggest frustration will be that fact that many of these resources are not “allowed” at school. I can understand the school systems concern about the use of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging in the classroom, but they hopefully will come to understand what valuable resources they can be to the school.

#5. Well I found the whole class to “intellectually challenging”! Since I had been out of college for over 16 years, it was hard for me to get back into college mode. It was a whole lot easier the first time around before I had a full time job, a husband, and three kids.

#6. Bored? Never! If I looked away for even a second, I missed something going on and felt behind.

#7 Keep in mind that you’re teaching this course for those trying to enter the classroom. If my school won’t allow me to access over half of these programs that were used in class, it isn’t going to do me a lot of good. While I enjoyed most of the things we learned about in class, I think you should focus more on the concepts that most teachers can use. The presentations, and the building of presentations, are probably far more useful than knowing how to use Twitter when it comes down to truly useful information.

#8. I think that I am a technologically literate teacher. I think we established in class that you don’t have to use every form of technology to be considered literate. I would consider myself to be good on the scale we were given. I think it’s important to constantly update yourself, or you will fall behind quickly. With the ever changing technology, it wouldn’t take much time at all to let yourself fall into the illiterate category.

#9. I’m not sure how to apply this question, since my situation is unique. I’ve already graduated and have a full time teaching job. I am going to continue to try to build on the knowledge I’ve gained in this class. I’d like to try to integrate a few concepts immediately into my classroom. Others, I’d like to research and build on. I’m not as afraid to jump in and start using some of these programs that are available. I think I’ll be a little more willing to put myself “out there”, if that’s what I’m going to ask of my students.