Technology in Classrooms

Although I agree with the use of technology within the classroom I am in full support of a solid educational basis being applied before confusing students with technology.  A strong base of the basic understandings of the lesson being taught is essential for students to be able to build their learning on with the use of technology.  I hope we never get to the point of using only technology and quit using good, old fashioned lecture to teach our students the various subject areas covered within a school system.

Great Eye-Opening Class

Dr. Rubin has helped me to open my eyes to the advances and uses of different technologies within the classroom.  I was very intimidated by this class at first, and thought about dropping but I am glad I stuck with it. This class has become so beneficial to me in that it exposed me to various technologies available to teachers, and students. I would recommend this class to anyone who needs exposure to technology use within any classroom.

All good things must come to an end...

I am so grateful for this class and I have learned so much! I have loved reading other blog posts and since we are teachers it is so easy to relate to each other. Teaching is a profession that I believe you must be "called" to do. It takes special people to do what we do. I am by no means saying that I am special, but I respect and adore any and every teacher!! This has been a great experience and Dr. Rubin has been absolutely wonderful. This is also my last class for my Masters!!!! I am beyond excited, relieved, and happy to be close to the end... just makes it a little sad when you have such wonderful teacher and classmates! I hope everyone takes what we have learned and apply it to our classrooms to help enrich our instruction for our students! God Bless You All!!! :)

EDUC-573B

This course was very useful and informative, it deals with some of the core aspects of student learning with technology. I enjoyed the textbook (Blogs, wikis, podcast) and will surely use it as my guide to implement what I have learned into the classroom. This was a great opportunity for learning!!!!

Enjoy Reading Posts!

In addition to all of the great things I've learned in this class and the ways I have used new types of technology and plan to continue using them in my classroom, I have really enjoyed reading my classmates' posts!  I love to read about ways that my peers are utilizing the new types of technology that we've learned about in this class.  It gives me ideas and inspiration.  I really love our class blog, a little network of teachers learning from their peers and sharing ideas.  :)

Math Teachers

For any math teachers.  Explore:  http://www.wolframalpha.com/

TECHNOLOGY

Technology is a great tool to use in the classroom.  This class has been very beneficial and has given me new avenues to create assignments!

Technology

This class has been a great experience and I have learned so much about technology and how to use it in the classroom. I really enjoyed pod casting, screening and just playing around with adding effects to power point slides.

Course feedback

This course was very useful.  I had very little knowledge about blogs, screencasts, podcasting, and webquests.  Now I feel very comfortable utilizing these technologies.  Thanks to Dr. Rubin for teaching this class!

GREAT CLASS!!!!!!!!

It's official, this is my last blog post of the semester.  Not only have I completed a class that I put off until the very last, I have completed my last assignment for my entire college career.  Over the past eight years I have worked really really hard,  enjoyed some of the classes, and spent a lot of money to make $35,000 a year.  What was I thinking?

Until we meet again!!!!!!!!!

GREAT CLASS!!!!!!

Wow, another semester already passed by.  I hope that everyone has had enjoyed the class as much as I have throughout the past few weeks.  At the beginning of class, I was scared of what this class consisted of and if I could do the work.  This class has definitely made me adventure outside my confort zone and produce work that I thought I was incapable of doing at times.  Yest, I would have to say that the work was a challenge, and even a headache somtimes (thank God for Doug at the helpdesk).  I would have to say hats off to Dr. Rubin for giving great step by step instructions, as well as those helpful emails that made the class a great learning experience.  Furthermore, I hope to utilize some of the ideas within my class in the near future such as the podcasts and the webquest.  Lastly, this particular class helped me to realize that staying in your comfort zone as an educator is something you should never do, because stepping outside the box is what separates good teachers from great teachers.

My Experience

I was hesitant to that this class online because I normally do not do well with technology is someone is not guiding me through the correct steps. This class gave me confidence to play around with new technology.  I learned the more you play around with technology, the more you can learn. I am excited to incorporate new technology into my future classes. 

Technology in the Classroom

This class is by far the most useful class I have taken throughout my college career. I was interested in incorporating technology into my classroom, but I had no idea where to start. My favorite assignment for the class was creating a screencast. I believe this use of technology will be extremely helpful to my students. Students will be able to see my screencast on my classroom blog and also be asked to create their own screencasts for classroom projects. All the teachers I have observed or student taught under had classroom blogs. I love the idea of having a classroom blog because it can be used as a tool for students and parents to communicate better with the teacher. I had a difficult time learning about podcasting but now that I have been introduced to the new technology, I am confident to incorporate it into my classroom. I believe the students will enjoy working together to create their own podcast.  I am excited to bring the newest technology into my classroom lessons.

My experience

This class has been a wonderful experience for me. I had heard of things such as podcasts, screencasts, and webquests before but, like anything, until you create one yourself you don't truly understand  the different ways you can incorporate them into your classroom. I will definitely take ideas from this course and use them to benefit my students. I would recommend this course to any future teacher simply because of the amount of students that learn best through the implementation of technology in today's generation.

Technology Class

This class has introduce me to the concept of using blogging as a communication device .One problem, I have had is finding a way to connect with parents and the community effectively.  By having a class blog, I can effectively communicate with students, parents, and the community about the different activities from class and school.

Great Experience

I have learned so much from this class.  Technology always made me nervous, but this class has made me realized that its not as bad as I always thought.  I would have never had tried making a blog or a podcast (things I never even knew what they were) but now I am not afraid to introduce these things in my classroom.  This class has introduced so many new things for me to explore.  One of my most favorite things that I have learned was the podcast.  I do believe my students will love to make create one for the class.  I am very glad that I took this class!!  I will recommend it to others.

Technology

This class has introduced me to new aspects of technology that I was unaware of.  This class has opened my eyes to new teaching methods that I can implement in my classes especially podcasting.  I have realized that podcasting can be used for labs, homebound students, or when students are absent.  When I am absent from the classroom, I can use podcasting to effectively present the learning material to the students.

Technology for Future Use

I learned a lot in this class about technologies I knew existed, but I had never thought about using in my classroom. I created another blog for a project in another class. If not for this technology class, I would have never given it a thought. I also plan on starting a fishing/hunting/outdoors blog for personal use. I hope that next school year I can use some of the new technologies we've learned about. I'm pretty computer savvy so most of the assignments weren't any trouble. I wasn't a fan of creating the podcast even though I enjoy listening to them. My favorite assignment was webquest. I had never heard of or seen one before class. And the students really enjoyed it.

Screencast

I really enjoyed the screencast just for the simple fact that I could use it to give a lesson on a day I have to be out of the classroom. I plan on using it the next time I have an appointment and need to keep moving with my lesson. A lot of the youtube videos I use in class are from screencast and I didn't even know what the were called. It was really neat, but took a few trys to get it right. With a better mic and some practice I think I could be efficient at it.

Screencast

I thought that the screencast was a really neat resource and something that I could definately see myself utilizing in my classroom in the future.  I can see it being very useful for demonstrating through diagrams for the students to view and see independently as well.  I could also see my students useing this to demonstrate thier knowledge of certain aspects of agriculture such as carcass evaluation, anatomy identification, and pest identification as well.  Very useful tool that I plan to implement into my classroom.

Technology in education

I have thought for a long time that utilizing new up to date technology was essential in the classroom to keep up with these technology based students.  Students are utilizing technology at a rapid rate and it is essential that our classroom keeps up with that rate.  In this class I learned some great tools that I can utilize in my classroom as methods of integrating technology into the class.  The podcasts I think will be really neat to utilize, allowing students to individually do a recording about a certain topic.  The webquest is also a very structured way to allow students to use the internet as a research tool for different projects.  Very informative and gave me some very useful technological tools to use in my classroom.

New Technology to Utilize

Throughout this course I have learned about several new types of technology  that I can utilize within my Kindergarten classroom.  I consider myself to be a tech-savvy teacher but before taking this class I would've never thought about using a podcast with kindergarteners, but that turned out to be one of their favorite projects of the year!  My students also loved the webquest that I made for this class.  I have enjoyed learning about additional types of technology to use in the classroom and I will definitely continue to use them in the future.

Physical Education/ Power Point

I was truly surprised at how much my students enjoyed my Power Point presentation as I began our softball unit!  I could see that they were glued to the screen as different elements appeared through-out the presentation .  For example, the first screen started off with "applause", then the sound of a "swoosh" as the rules would fly in, then when the diagram of the field appeared with the sound of a bat hitting the ball...etc.  When I saw the look on their faces I knew that I needed to have a power point at the beginning of each unit because I could see that they were immediately excited about what was to come in unit!

Eye opening class!

I can honestly say that this class has been "eye opening" to me!  I was very nervous when we started and I remember my first response from Dr. Rubin, it was "don't get bogged by the blog".  Since then I have learned so many things!  I have truly become more comfortable with the new technology. (Well, at least it is new to me. LOL)  I had never heard of Jing, never made a post, had never done a Web Quest, podcast or even a power point!  This class has challenged me to be more open-minded and try new things! 

Technology in the Classroom

Wow! The things we have learned in this class! I was familiar with some types of technology and I use them daily in my classroom for instructional and educational purposes, but I now have several new types of technology that I can incorporate in my class. I am very excited about what I have learned and what I am going to use! I think my favorite has been the Podcast. I teach Kindergarten so that is a fun way for them to be involved and use technology at a young age. It is simply amazing as to what we now have available. Do you think technology will eventually take over the classroom?

Rethinking Education and Technology

This course has caused me to pause, reflect, and rethink the use of technology in education.  In my job at KDE, we utilize technology daily to connect with teachers, administrators, consultants, other state DOE's, organizations, etc. but I really had not given it much thought until this course.  I have pondered new possibilities for technology usage in education.  We must move beyond the era of technology in the classroom meaning a class trip to the school computer lab.  With the ability to blog, podcast, screencast, videocast, social media, polling, etc. teachers have many opportunities to integrate technology seamlessly into their curriculum as an everyday process.  I really think technology is going to challenge traditional mainstream public education and force us to rethink ways in which students learn and the environments possible for learning.  I do not see how we will continue thinking education requires us to meet collectively in a physical space for learning to occur.  Technology will push us to rethink education as it has pushed us to rethink most other areas of our lives.

Technology Brings Social Studies Alive!

As a 20 year veteran in education as a high school social studies teacher, administrator, and now for the Kentucky Department of Education as social studies consultant and director of social studies networks, I can honestly say we still have much more to do in classrooms to utilize 21st Century skills.  Our students are living, breathing examples of technology and use these skills daily in their lives like many of us do as well.  The technology covered in this course fully recognizes the importance of technology in education and how it can be a tool to bring our classrooms alive and interactive for our students.  I think it is exciting to have students blogging, making their own screencasts and podcasts, and collaborating with the use of technology.  Technology can change the face of social studies and bring life to history and other content areas rather than stale lectures.  The technology turns the classroom roles into the teacher as facilitator and the student as the actively engaged learner using technology to individualize instruction.  Social studies teachers in Kentucky should embrace technology and use it to spark student interest and inquiry into our field.

Finishing a year with new ideas

After taking this class, and knowing the push that is currently in my school for technology, I wish that I had taken this class over the summer. There were so many great ideas for being able to use more technology in the classroom, that I hate that I spent an entire year without the skills. Hopefully next year I will be able to incorporate more of these tools in my teaching and know the equipment to request in order to make it happen.

One final thought

One of the things I look forward to implementing is a podcast.  Since my little guys are early readers, I know they will love recording themselves reading.  They will love listening back to themselves and allowing peers to listen to them read.

I am now a more technology savy Preschool Teacher!!!

Before taking this class I did not think this technology could benefit my students because of there age but  I was wrong.  I have really enjoyed this class and look forward to implementing what I have learned.  Thank you for expanding my knowledge of web tools!!!

First Blog

#FirstTimeBlogger.  Can't believe it has took me this long to get a blog going.

First post

HEY :)

Bout to get weird #Legggooo

first time blogging

This is my 1st attempt at blogging. Hope I can figure this thing out!

Game Time

First blog post. Nbd (No big deal). It's a good day to be in the library.. blogging. All I need is a coffee in my hand and a thick pair of black rimmed glasses and I would look professional.

I am here

Technology in the Classroom

Teachers are always talking about ways to use technology in the classroom, and most of the time they are only talking about power points or watching a video from You Tube. Well, through this class, I have been introduced to some new (new to me) ways to use real technology in my classroom. And it's not just been, oh here are somethings you can use. It's been here are things you can use and how to use them with lots of details on how to make them work in my classroom. I am very excited for the new discoveries my students will be making in the future with the use of these "new" technology resources.

The Blogging Thing

So I really thought this blogging "thing" was something that I did not want to get involved in, but now I'm trying to think of ways to use blogs in my classroom next year. The book is so helpful with telling you how to track your students work and how to grade it. I really wish I would have tried blogging earlier in my career.

Blogging Fun

I've absolutely loved the process of creating a blog so far!  It's something I would definitely use inside and outside of my classroom, and I look forward to playing around with that technology more.