Use it or lose it!

The cartoon displayed above is a quick reminder that how important it is for us to continue the journey that Connie and Steve have taken us on.   Saving bookmarks through Delicious and/or Diigo is a start, using Twitter and other technology to share resources and ideas makes the continuation of our journey exciting!

Through our course we have learned the importance of being a role model to our students in our use of technology.  Many have learned that it's a fun, exciting way of reinventing how we teach and to transform our courses into the medium that our students want to learn.   It truly does engage our students!  In wrapping things up, I discovered the following presentation at Slideshare ... I hope everyone enjoys it!

Presentations

Sometimes getting things setup for student presentations is as stressful for the teacher as it is for the students.  This past week I planned on having my college students at SNHU participate in VoiceThread to provide their peers with feedback during our Thursday evening hybrid class.  I discovered that the new updates to the software in my computer lab in Brunswick prevented the class from being able to access the VoiceThread website.  ... time for Plan B!

I then changed the method for students to provide feedback so that students would use Wallwisher ... same problem, students couldn't access the site thanks to some software conflicts created by the IT Department at the Manchester campus ... onto Plan C!

I turned on my LCD projector, opened a generic presentation and asked students what they liked about it, what areas needed work, and then led them in discussion on the use of fonts, white space, graphics, and citing sources in their presentations.  My goal of having them use Voice Thread never materialized due to problems in the lab but at least the majority of the students used the advice I provided them in fine tuning their presentations. 

My wiki

I created a wiki at https://pcteacher.wikispaces.com and quickly realized that I would probably not use this format for teaching my Computer Concepts class.   Although I want them exposed to how to create a wiki, I do not want them having the ability of changing assignments or heaven forbid, deleting them!

I found creating the wiki to be pretty straight forward and could make for some interesting discussions in class where students help in creating content rather than working from teacher-created content.

Google Sites

I quickly learned I'm not a fan of Google Sites.   Perhaps it's because I'm used to Dreamweaver but I actually found that creating a site with Google Sites was a bit confusing. I understand how to add links, graphics, change text, add calendars, etc. but getting a menu for navigation dumbfounded me to the point that I actually gave up!

With Dreamweaver if I were stumped on something, I knew I could at least bounce over to Notepad and view the code to figure out what was going on ... well it's a learning experience and I've learned for now I'm going back to Dreamweaver!

Wikis

I've looked at a number of wikis and think they could be a great tool ... but at the same time, if they are to be effective, could take a lot of time to setup.   I currently have websites I've built for students in each of my courses to use.  Perhaps I'll experiment by transforming one of them into a wiki instead of a traditional website.

The url for my wiki is https://pcteacher.wikispaces.com like any website, it's always a work in progress ... at least I have it started!  :)

catching up

Being a computer teacher, I have to love the challenge of figuring out why my computer refuses to allow me to do something ... somehow I have an error connected with Groupwise, browsers, and the Smartboard ... more later ... class is about to start.

Day 1

Today we were introduced to Moodle, reviewed information about the course and what our weekly requirements will be.   In addition, we responded in the discussion forum and created our own blogs.  I am excited to be taking this course, particularly at this time.   I have taken two other graduate courses this summer (Social Networking and Web 2.0 in the Classroom and Interactive Teaching in the Classroom) and combined with this one here at SPSD, will be using it to retools how and what I teach.

Textbooks quickly become outdated; however, online resources allow us as educators to create rich teaching tools to share with our students an colleagues that are both timely and can create interesting diaglogues.  I need to quickly pull together the information from all three of these courses into a usable collection of information before it becomes just another pile of papers on my desk!

One example is about Using Gmail to call phones.