Adios, Amigos!

My experience in EDM 310 has been very beneficial. With the help of my fellow students I have definitely learned a lot. However, I am never sad to see the end of a semester. I have enjoyed the company of everyone in the class, but I have to say it is time for a break. Hopefully, I will see some of you in classes to come, but for now I just have to say Merry Christmas and Good luck on finals!

Final Reflections

I feel like this class has been a great starting point to help me in the future. Everything we were exposed to can be used in my future classroom or as a tool to help benefit my own personal education experience right now. Some of my favorites were all the different Google applications which I can utilize while working on certain projects or use as a way to connect with my students later. Pretty much everything I could ever need to find or organize can be done via Google. iTunesU also struck me as a good source for papers and research I might need to do later on that would be a little unconventional, but completely useful. I also can see many uses for thing such as podcasts, videocasts, and Google Earth. These are very good educational resources that can really encourage students to enjoy learning which is something I hope to foster later on.

When I first started this class, I thought it was going to be about teaching me how to integrate technoogy into the classroom effectively. Altough this is true, I thought it was going to tell me exactly what to do. Instead I was left to my own devices. This seems like the best approach for the goal of the class. It would have been very easy to have been spoon fed how to integrate technology in the classroom, but it what I would have learned would have been outdated soon. I may have thought that was what the class was about, but I'm much happier that it was different from what my original vision of the class was.

I do not feel like there was anything I learned this semester I plan on dumping starting next week. There are a few things I feel more interested in continuing to loose, but for the long run, I feel like everything might have been beneficial to someone in some way.

This class probably wasn't the most exciting every time I came into class. I thoroughly enjoyed having our guest speakers via Skype. Those were always the most interesting days. Another good thing was that this class was extremely relaxing. It did not bring me any stress so that is definitely comforting to me.

The most difficult thing to understand this semester has been the html scripting. I cannot by any means speak computer. I don't think I ever will. One thing I can do is follow directions. That is the only way I was able to complete some fo the blog assignments. Remembering what to do and how they will benefit someone else was the easy part. Understanding why the html scriping works the way it does is still a question I have yet to find an understandable answer to.

Yes, at times Iwas bored in this class. This mostly happened on days where we did a lot of setting up for a project. Like previewing Google Earth and setting up for our Blogs where we had to click and type specific things. Class became rather montonouss those days. However, despite the montonaity I also appreciated the step by step actions that way I wouldn't have to worry about figuring it all out on my own.

I feel like some of the things that would be most beneficial to me in my teaching career, such as Delicious, ACCESS and ALEX,were only given a slight glance at. Blogging is a very useful tool, but there seem to be other things that could give me so many more brainstorming ideas or creative teaching techniques later on that I might forget about whenever I start teaching because I didn't get a thorough explanation of their uses.

Technologically literate? Not quite there yet. Technologically informed? Definitely. To become technologically literate I feel like I would have to utilize the tools I have been exposed to for a much longer amount of time than how long I have currently been using them.

There are quite a few things we have learned about over the semeste which will be beneifical to me as a student. Hopefully by implementing this knowledge and using it for the rest of my college career I will be better able to use it in the classroom to give out assignments that will be more beneficial to my students.

Technology is constantly changing and there is no way to make things stay the same. The only option is to teach us how to go forth and continue learnine and evolving the classroom as the world around us evolves as well. This is by far the most important thing for me to take away from this class.

My Personal Learning Network

Over the semester I had a hard time understanding the benefits of a PLN (Personal Learning Network). I think it had something to do with the fact that Dr. Strange's PLN is set to accommodate his career and interests. Somehow I was convinced my PLN had to be beneficial to me as a teacher to help further my career on down the road. What I have now realized is that a PLN is meant to benefit a person individually. My needs right now for my current career are nothing like Dr. Strange's or Mr. Chamberlin's. They both have fantastic examples of uses and benefits from them, but neither of them have a PLN similar to my current needs.

In the future I plan on being an educator, but right now my full time career is a student. My PLN needs to reflect that. To do so I need to make connections with people who are going through the same things academically I am that way I will always have resources to assist me when I am stuck on an assignment. A PLN that would fit my needs includes my fellow students who can help me collaborate on different class assignments. It can also include current professors and former teachers from high school.

Another challenge I faced with my PLN is where to contact people. Twitter does seem to be the uprising new 'it' thing for social networking, but I personally do not access it too often and niether do my friends who also have an account on Twitter. I decided to base mine on Facebook instead. It is another social networking site, but is something I use quite regularly along with the rest of my fellow students and a lot of my former teachers and some professors. I made this decision because in order for my PLN to be useful by any means it must be based off of something that is reliable.

After I finally cam to the conclusion of how I could best benefit from a PLN and where it would be best located, Irealized a PLN is something I had seemed to be utilizing all semester without realizing it. In each and every one of my classes I have at least one contact person who I can send a message and get answers to the questions I might have about a certain class. Many of thes people are also going into similar fields as myself so there is a large chance I will most likely maintain the connection and use it to benefit myself later on once I start my teaching career. As time goes by I hope to aquire more connections. This is just a starting point that will hopefully trigger some much bigger things for me later on.

Project 11

For my Project 11 Assignment I made a video on Geocaching. The video can be viewed HERE on YouTube.

Comments 4 Kids

I feel like Comments 4 Kids is a good way to integrate education majors into the classroom. It also is very beneficial to all of the students whose blogs that we comment on. A few of the blogs we had to comment on were a bit difficult to comment on, but for the most part I feel like this was an assignment that opened our eyes a bit to things that children appreciate when learning. The majority of the blogs we were assigned to comment on were for elementary students and some thing for little children never change. They always love when older students talk to them and acknowledge them. No matter how much technology is integrated into the classroom, children will always like when older students pay attention to them. They look up to students who are older than them so receiving comments from us was quite an experience for them.

Wikipedia

For our podcast, we talked about using Wikipedia. We discussed whether or not it was a valid source and also how or if we as individuals used it. So, sit back, relax and join in the discussion by clicking HERE.

Usefulness of a Collaborative Blog

At the Teacher's Desk is a collaborative blog that teachers from all over the nation use to share interesting experiences they have within the classroom. Most of the post in some way involve technology.

My favorite posts were the ones that had to do with Skyping the ESL classroom in with a Spanish classroom in another state. That seems like a very beneficial thing for both classrooms. I personally want to be an ESL teacher eventually so I was involuntarially drawn to those particular posts. I really love that they these students were able to take their common knowledge in order to help someone else in their education.

ATTD as a whole seems like a great way to share ups and downs of technology. Also in the ESL posts was where Mr. Chamberlin shared what he would change about his next video conference and why. I found this to be very beneficial for other teachers to avoid the same difficulties later on.