EDCI 5825 - Final Project Blog

Link to Laura's Blog

I hope that I will be able to use the Blog that I have created in the classroom. When I know what I am teaching I would be able to add course specific information to the blog. This would hopefully make it more personal and meaningful for the class. Once there was more class specific information such as homework or project assignments, the students and parents would hopefully start visiting the blog, using it for information and posting questions and thoughts there.

I would like to be able to have students create their own blogs for the classroom. It will depend on the school system that am teaching in, the maturity of the students and the technology available. Many students may have the capability to go online at home but we would only be able do this as a class if there are adequate resources in school as well. I also would want to make sure that the students are mature enough to understand the point of having their own blog and that is was for school work not a social site.

My view of instructional technology has changed very much over the last few weeks. At the start of the class I thought that Facebook, blogs and wikis were really only social or political sites and had not idea that they had uses for education. I had also never listened to a podcast or heard of Jing so I had not thought of that technology as educational either. I hope to use many of the technologies that I have learned in this class, including all the new power point techniques too.

I think that since this was the first time I had used most of the technology in this class (jing, garageband, imovie, blogs and wikis) that I will only get better as I use the technology more. I think that the items that I created were okay for first attempts. They are generally usable but not as dynamic or slick as they could be. I think that I could use most of it in a high school environment but will look to keep improving.

The wiki alone for this class was very intimidating when I first looked at it. As I looked at the projects included, it was very scary. But that was worse than actually working on any of the projects. There always seems to be one thing that is hard to figure out on each project but overall I am excited about using the techniques and more comfortable using the technology than I ever thought I would be after a few weeks.