Reflections

My experiences in this course have introduced me to several new technologies that I am excited to put to use as an educator and to share with others.  It was exciting to practice with so many apps and programs that can be incorporated into the classroom with students because our students are living a life immersed in technology,  Anytime that I am able to bring an activity to students that is driven by technology, most of them truly seem to enjoy the learning process more than if I resort to the lecture and notes method.

I have been a Facebook user for a long time, so I have some experience with it and how it can be used in education.  Our district tends to use it more for making announcements and passing along information to parents since that is the age group who predominately used Facebook.  I had a blast, though, playing with my new Instagram and Vine accounts.  I have already worked with an English teacher on incorporating Vine into her upcoming unit, and I am very excited to see how it will work.  I know that the students will enjoy the activity.  I haven't played with Twitter quite as much, but I know what an awesome resource it can be, and I plan to become more familiar and comfortable with it.

I am also putting infographics to use in my current position.  I send out a tip for the district each Tuesday, and I have been using the infographic sites to create these documents to email out.  

Screencasts and QR Codes were elements that I already had some experience with.  I recently created a QR Code for our counselors' office that hangs in every teacher's classroom for students to scan and sign up to see their counselor.  This is helping us decrease traffic in the hallways during classes.  I have used Screencast-o-matic several times, but I enjoyed learning about Jing, and have opted to keep it on my laptop to use in the future.

I shared some of the sites for creating comics just last week with a teacher who was wanting her students to create comics to go along with their unit.  She was commenting about how so many of them were nervous about drawing, and I was excited to share these resources with her.  I have an upcoming project in mind myself that I plan to have students use the comic makers for.

The only assignment that I ran into trouble with was the podcasting assignment, only because I couldn't get my account created due to some strange glitch that was happening in one of the programs.

I definitely found this course to be a super resource for my future, and I enjoyed so many of the activities that we did.  I have put several of them to real-life use, and find myself sharing these ideas with others on a regular basis.  I am even considering creating a personal blog, because I have found that I enjoy this process.

As for the students, I truly feel that they can benefit from all of these technologies if they are thoughtfully planned for and incorporated into the right classes.  I love the idea of having students show their understanding of a concept in a 6 second vine.  I also think that exploring and introducing podcasts to the classroom would be beneficial.  Ultimately, I think that each of these technologies could enhance a lesson in a way that would make it enjoyable and valid for our students.