Thursday, July 25, 2013

Final Reflection for IT 3210

Final Reflection
This class has helped fortify my decision to come back to school to teach.  The tools that we learned to use will help us get students involved and excited about otherwise mundane content.  This course gave us the opportunity to explore different ways of conveying our lessons.  Ways of keeping students engaged and eager to learn. 
The days of reading pages upon pages of text and memorizing content are long gone.  I will take these tools and use them to instruct.  I’m also excited about having students use these same tools to convey their own understanding of the curriculum.
One regret I have is not having used Edmodo more during this class.  I will do my best to keep up with posts of my classmates and colleagues so that I don’t fall too far behind the digital curve.  I would even consider taking this class again in the future so that I can keep up with all the new developments that may arise.  It would be a great refresher course to stay up to date with the progress of web 2.0 tools.

Thanks to all my classmates for a great, albeit short, semester.  I look forward to keeping in touch in the future and wish you all the best of luck!  

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Coming down to the wire!  One official week left and then finals week.  This semester went by extremely fast.  I learned a lot, and am sure these things will help me be a better teacher in the future.
I tested out a few digital storytelling sites and programs this week.  Voicethread has a great demo on how to create a voice thread presentation in less than a minute.  Here's the link.
The digital storytelling tool I ended up using for A4 is Comic Life.  You can get a free 30 day trial at plasq.com
This program has many formats to choose from, including many education friendly ones.  The pictures that you want to use can be dragged and dropped into the proper places with ease.  Now if only this program could make me funnier.  Its a good program and I highly recommend it.
This last week I look forward to looking at all of my classmates individual work on their LEPs.  We've had some great presentations this semester and I'm sure this last week won't disappoint.