From+My+Heart

WOW, I'm done with my wiki! And I want to tell you some things I really enjoyed this class. I found the most valuable thing that I learned as far as useful technology is all the amazing Web 2.0 tools out there. They are (mostly) free and can be used by teachers and teachers and students alike to collaborate on assignments. What did I learn about myself. I guess I’d say, more than anything, the lesson I learned in this class (or that was reiterated in this class) was “slow and steady wins the race”. I often wanted to jump into assignments without following the screencasts, etc. Ultimately, this was more time consuming than if I had just watched the screencasts and studied all the examples more thoroughly. I think this was an excellent start for a class website but I found the wiki site itself to be very frustrating. I especially found this to be true when I would add or change things and try to get the fonts and colors the same. It would often reformat everything and then make what I already had different. I never did overcome this problem. So, going back, I would keep everything more simple instead of trying to make everything really visually appealing. At least, on the wiki site. In terms of overcoming obstacles concerning technology, one thing that I found in this class was that almost every technological problem I had- had a corresponding Youtube tutorial to help me! This is such a valuable tool. I have used it many times now for this class and others. I studied for hours on Youtube for the Praxis (the math!) and it really really helped. In the future, when I have a technological hurdle to cross I’ll just get a free lesson on Youtube before hand. I aim to be a twenty-first century teacher in the classroom. I am concerned about what types of technology will be available to me in the classroom. I hope to ultimately have all the students have access to computers. I also hope to have a projector for my laptop so we can go over things on the computer together. I currently volunteer at a school that has 6 computers in the classroom but no overhead projector for a computer (only the “old school “ kind). Using the tools that I have learned in this class, I will better be able to be an awesome twenty first century teacher!