Week 8 - Where do we go from here?

I have had a lot of "a-ha" moments during the last eight weeks. Every week I learned about something that was new to me. Sure, I'd heard of blogs and podcasts and wikis, but I had never used any of them! I really cannot stress how lacking my technology education has been until now. I have learned so many things that I will be able to use with students in a classroom, to communicate with parents and other faculty members, and just for my own personal use. To answer the question "Where do we go from here?", I think for me the answer is practice. I need to continue to work to learn more about these different forms of technology and figure out how to best incorporate them into my lesson plans.

I think the thing I enjoyed most in this class was the wiki. I think it will be very useful in the classroom. It is made for students to work with collaboratively and will also be a great communication resource to use for many purposes with other teachers.

Concept Map

Week 7 - Do You Google?

For the technology project this week I created a lesson plan on "Famous Texans" to use for 4th grade Texas History. I decided to use Blogger, a Google Sites wiki, and Google Search. Students will research, respond to prompts on a response blog, and create a summary of information about a famous Texan to add to a class wiki. I chose these Google Apps because I felt they were simple enough to use with students who may not have had much computer experience, without taking up a lot of instructional time. I would also have students work in groups on projects like this so that they learn from each other as well.

I think this is a type of lesson that students will enjoy. There are many different parts to it, so students aren't just doing research and writing a report.

I do view instruction differently than I did at the beginning of this class. I see every week that there are so many ways to include technology. Actually thinking out a lesson plan this week showed me that it is not difficult to include technology once you have a good variety of tools and apps available to use.

Week 6 - Can you hear me now?

I finally got the podcast done for the week 6 assignment. I had a lot of trouble with this assignment. I think I was just making it way more difficult than it really was.

If I had a magic wand I would wave it over myself. There is a lot of responsibility that goes along with all of the technology we will be teaching. It's going to take a lot of work and patience, and knowing (and admitting) that some students probably know know more about what I'm teaching than I do.