Week #9 Class Reflection

Teaching and Learning in a Networked Classroom is a class that all teachers should take.

Now I know how students feel when they are in a class that is relevant to what is going on in the world. You get excited about learning! A three credit class should be a 45 hour commitment. I can honestly say that I have more than 100 hours of exciting searches, experimenting, problem solving, communicating, collaborating etc. The classroom text was also relevant and current to the trends and issues in technology and education. Relevant information for both inside and outside of the classroom. By relevant, I am actually excited to take the tools and information and integrate them into my curriculum. Not to mention, I am excited to share some of these with other colleagues.

One example of how I am going to utilize the tools in this class is that I spent the better part of last week building an online networked classroom on Wet Paint. Check out the image above. I can apply all the information into the real world. This has empowered and enabled me to post announcements, class outlines, weekly assignments, project ideas, resources etc. I was so excited; I transformed two of my classes into an online Wiki environment. Both my Web Design class and my Media Presentations class will function completely online. I am excited for my students. I am even more excited because I will no longer “HOG” all the space on the school server. When you run classes that utilize technology, you need more space. I would often times experience guilt when I knew my students just submitted their projects. It wouldn't take long before the calls would start coming in. The calls and complaints would occur because there was no more space left on the server. The technology coordinator would kindly ask everyone to delete, or move something. Now, I can now run my class guilt free!

I am also realizing that my blog can be transformed into a very powerful tool to share information and connect to resources. Teachers are always searching for fun activities to add to their classroom. I can transform my blog as a tool for teachers. With Jing, I now can include video tutorials, I love JING! This tool will empower me in so many ways. I can design my own web tutorials, I can add resources to the portfolio process. Instead of showing teachers and students the same thing a thousand times, I can put a video into a blog and students can watch it as many times as they like. Teachers can watch it too! So, when students want a reminder on how to resize images, I can send them to my blog! So many exciting tools!

I am having students create their own blogs and I hope to integrate class reflection activities. Each day I will pose an essential question, quote or something that will require a reflective response. I hope blogging will be a fun way to get students engaged by thinking, reading, typing and learning. I recently came across an article by Jeff Utecht that claimed Wet Paint is making improvements for educators. I have so many exciting ideas for utilizing Wet Paint. Utecht claims that they are even removing ads on the educational wikis. This is something I have to look into. I hope it is not too late; I’ve already converted my classes. I subscribed to his blog to be sure I can stay up to date with the changes! (RSS, Gotta Love IT!!)

Some other things I am grateful for….
GOOGLE DOCS! I am already integrating GOOGLE docs. I have to track seniors and portfolios with five other people. This gives me the opportunity to set up a shared document where we can log in and record a pass/fail comments for the guidance department. This solves so many problems. Oh yea! Check out my Wordle….. I made a poster for my classroom. I created a great sub plan for students to create a wordle of their favorite teacher. Imagine a student handing their favorite Teacher a poster with kind words. That is why I love this class. I believe it is current and relevant to what is going on with the world. I am excited about blogs, wikis, RSS, google docs, audacity etc.