This is my final blog post for the semester, and I must say, I am sad to say goodbye. This semester has flown by so quickly! It's amazing how life can do that to you. I really appreciated all that I learned in this class, and there is so much I have to say about it and the projects that there's probably not enough room to include everything here.
Looking back on my initial post, I outlined several expectations, such as feedback, collaboration, and challenging myself. As far as feedback goes, Ginny does a really good job giving us the feedback we need and ask for in class. Even though it may seem a bit harder to receive students' feedback, I feel that, as a class, we have done an okay job. There really wasn't enough opportunity to get proper feedback from students on the class (besides evaluations). Overall though, I think that teacher-student communication fared well. In terms of collaboration, I don't think we had any big concerns working with one another. There were a few misunderstandings/miscommunications, but nothing major that jeopardized the quality of the work our groups put in. As far as challenging myself, I'm glad I did. I made a promise to myself that I would not only learn how to use technology, but to really expand my comfort zones. There were definitely projects I wasn't as comfortable with, but that was part of the learning curve.
In terms of the projects we completed, I enjoyed learning about and creating the wikis, my web 2.0 tool Delicious, and the Inspiration and Excel projects. Even though I had some difficulties with Excel, I liked how the function of the spreadsheet was so multifaceted in the classroom. The part I enjoyed about the wiki creations was the collaboration. I thought it was cool to see everyone post on the same page at different times. That aspect of the wiki makes it modern, live, and accessible. I really loved Delicious. My partner and I worked well together, and I loved the fact that there was a social website dedicated to bookmarking.
In terms of difficulty, I would say that I struggled the most with the iMovie. I found the fact that I struggled with this project unfortunate, because once I got the hang of it I really enjoyed creating my movie. The problem was that I didn't give myself enough time to do a good job on it and also the fact that iMovie kept giving me so much grief. The iMovie project definitely taught me to plan ahead, even if I think I'm prepared. I found most of the projects enjoyable, but learning how to meet state standards was hard. Integrating state standards into our projects was actually very good practice, but in the first few projects I felt like I was grappling with content. I was still trying to find the right area of concentration I wanted to focus on for my projects, so finding the right stand standards for my level and area was difficult. However, I did learn from various projects I've completed is that I really love reading and language arts. That said, I should probably look into becoming a reading specialist in the future.
I feel that I am much more prepared to use technology now. I feel like I've had enough practice to where I could self-guide if I needed to work on future projects because certain facets and tools have overlapped in our projects. For instance, embedding seems to be a function that comes up time and time again, as well as the proper use of hyperlinks. Another thing I have learned that proves useful is copyright law. I will admit I didn't really know much about teacher copyright law, but now that I understand how it works I try to be more respectful of using others' works.
Even if you've reached a point to where you feel comfortable enough with technology, you must continue to lose it. Like with everything else, if you don't use it, you lose it. Therefore, in order to keep up my knowledge of technology and web tools, I need to keep using them and share that wealth of information with others who might be beginners. Overall though, I think this class has and will continue to prepare pre-service teachers for technology use in the classroom. I do feel that I am more prepared to use technology with students. Still, I would like to continue learning about even more technological tools. I would say that we have learned the tools to effectively use technology, and that this class has given us those tools to succeed.
Looking back on my initial post, I outlined several expectations, such as feedback, collaboration, and challenging myself. As far as feedback goes, Ginny does a really good job giving us the feedback we need and ask for in class. Even though it may seem a bit harder to receive students' feedback, I feel that, as a class, we have done an okay job. There really wasn't enough opportunity to get proper feedback from students on the class (besides evaluations). Overall though, I think that teacher-student communication fared well. In terms of collaboration, I don't think we had any big concerns working with one another. There were a few misunderstandings/miscommunications, but nothing major that jeopardized the quality of the work our groups put in. As far as challenging myself, I'm glad I did. I made a promise to myself that I would not only learn how to use technology, but to really expand my comfort zones. There were definitely projects I wasn't as comfortable with, but that was part of the learning curve.
In terms of the projects we completed, I enjoyed learning about and creating the wikis, my web 2.0 tool Delicious, and the Inspiration and Excel projects. Even though I had some difficulties with Excel, I liked how the function of the spreadsheet was so multifaceted in the classroom. The part I enjoyed about the wiki creations was the collaboration. I thought it was cool to see everyone post on the same page at different times. That aspect of the wiki makes it modern, live, and accessible. I really loved Delicious. My partner and I worked well together, and I loved the fact that there was a social website dedicated to bookmarking.
In terms of difficulty, I would say that I struggled the most with the iMovie. I found the fact that I struggled with this project unfortunate, because once I got the hang of it I really enjoyed creating my movie. The problem was that I didn't give myself enough time to do a good job on it and also the fact that iMovie kept giving me so much grief. The iMovie project definitely taught me to plan ahead, even if I think I'm prepared. I found most of the projects enjoyable, but learning how to meet state standards was hard. Integrating state standards into our projects was actually very good practice, but in the first few projects I felt like I was grappling with content. I was still trying to find the right area of concentration I wanted to focus on for my projects, so finding the right stand standards for my level and area was difficult. However, I did learn from various projects I've completed is that I really love reading and language arts. That said, I should probably look into becoming a reading specialist in the future.
I feel that I am much more prepared to use technology now. I feel like I've had enough practice to where I could self-guide if I needed to work on future projects because certain facets and tools have overlapped in our projects. For instance, embedding seems to be a function that comes up time and time again, as well as the proper use of hyperlinks. Another thing I have learned that proves useful is copyright law. I will admit I didn't really know much about teacher copyright law, but now that I understand how it works I try to be more respectful of using others' works.
Even if you've reached a point to where you feel comfortable enough with technology, you must continue to lose it. Like with everything else, if you don't use it, you lose it. Therefore, in order to keep up my knowledge of technology and web tools, I need to keep using them and share that wealth of information with others who might be beginners. Overall though, I think this class has and will continue to prepare pre-service teachers for technology use in the classroom. I do feel that I am more prepared to use technology with students. Still, I would like to continue learning about even more technological tools. I would say that we have learned the tools to effectively use technology, and that this class has given us those tools to succeed.
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