Blog Reflection

This is my final blog, because I am almost completely done with w401.  Overall, I think that the blogs were okay, but I think there are better ways to do reflections than blogs.  Yes, blogs are one way to integrate technology in the classroom, but I feel that a journal of reflections would be just as effective.  So as a student I think blogs are okay, but I definitely felt that they were too time consuming and sometimes didn't seem to be very helpful.  Maybe if the topics were more structured I may have felt differently about blogging.

As a teacher I think the benefit of doing blogs could be getting feedback on how the class is going, and what needs to be improved.  However, if students don't have access to this type of technology then it could be a problem, and probably shouldn't be used.  Overall,  I think that blogs could be a productive way to get feedback on the class, so they do merit consideration.

March 13

Today I presented my technology integration.  I thought that the presentation were pretty cool overall, and I got some really good ideas.  The one problem that I really have is several people did not get enough time to present, and it really wasn't fair to those individuals.  Also, I felt that presenting only 20 minutes of a 45-90 minute lesson made it difficult to present.  Overall it was a nice project, but it needs some work.

Technology Integration

Overall, I thought that the discussion on breeze was very informative, and helpful.  I really enjoyed the fact that we didn't just have to sit their and listen, because it can be a little boring at times.  I thought the active discussion was much more beneficial to all  of us, and I got some really good ideas from my classmates.  Most importantly I now have a better idea of what technology use is and what technology integration is.  The most important idea being that integration is interactive and has the students more involved than technology use.  An example of use would be a PowerPoint presentation, and an example of integration would using PowerPoint for a review game where the students were interacting.  

Website

I thought creating a website was really helpful.  I learned a lot about creating a site that would benefit students.  Some of my favorite ideas were online assignments, and podcast for review, but the feature on my site that I liked best was the questions widget because it allowed my students to ask a question at anytime.  I also thought that the workshop last week was very helpful, and I really like the extra links showing us how to do things like embed video's into a power point.  Overall, I thought this was one of the better assignments, but what if our students don't have computers at home?  How do we communicate important information like this to them?  That is only flaw I found with the project, it assumes that students have this type of technology available.

Jan. 30 W-401 Blog

I thought that the power point presentations on breeze was pretty cool.  It worked pretty well with only a few minor setbacks.  The entire time I was thinking about how cool it would be to be able to use this to help students with homework or something along those lines.  I thought the information provide in the power points was really cool,  google earth could be a great lead into a new unit, Skype could be used to communicate to people far away like a senator, all of the technologies are really neat.  The only thing I really didn't like was that I could always hear people on breeze, which made it difficult at times to pay attention.  I think I will use Skype in class, because I like the idea of using it to contact a senator, and have him/her talk to the kids about the issues that matter to them.