Week Ten: Final Reflection

This course has been a great experience for me. I feel I have gained an overall improved sense of how the internet can enhance teaching and learning across a variety of ages. In the various courses I have taken this summer, there has been a resounding emphasis on the number of tools that are at our fingertips and the notion that students are growing up in a digital age. This is so true and we need to make an effort to use this to our advantage. We have the power to tap into our students thinking and creativity outside the confines of a traditional teaching and learning context. There are endless possibilities for teachers to enhance or extend their traditional lessons by using some of the learning tools found on the internet.
As I have mentioned, or at least thought to myself many times throughout this course, it is so important for teachers to take advantage of professional development opportunities in technology. Technology is one of those areas where students could very easily get ahead of us. I always make every effort to stay at least 3 steps ahead of my students (I do mean this literally as I had autistic students who would be down the street if I wasn't 3 steps ahead of them!!). I may not always be sucessful, but I try very hard!

Week 9: Youtube, Podcasts & ebooks

I'm not sure if it was the excitement of almost completing all of the assignments for this course...but I had a hard time with the Week 9 assignments!! The stars were definitly not aligned for me on this one! On Youtube, I spent some time checking out clips that came up for Randy Pausch. He was such an inspiration..there's some really nice tributes on there. Unfortunately I had horrible luck cutting and pasting any of these clips to my Blog..I tried copying from Youtube then pasting into blog using the html/javascript tab..and that would not work. I was totally stumped because I thought I had successfully done this in at least one previous assignment. Maybe something was different with this scenario..whatever it was, I was unable to paste the link into my Blog. Much easier time adding the ebooks to my Googlereader.

Week 8: Online productivity, LibraryThing..

I really liked the online word processing tools and the online library tool. The online word processing would be a wonderful tool to use with students during their writing process. Could access their docs in the classroom, in the computer lab or from home. Also a great tool for teachers whether it be for our school related work or for coursework that we might be taking. We JUST recently uploaded XP onto our computer so I have struggled with Wordpad for the past 5 years...trying to save docs a certain way so that others could read them etc...Again, if only I knew about some of these tools sooner!!! I am hoping to incorporate the Google word processing into my Week 10 lesson plan..fingers crossed that it won't be too difficult to figure out!