EDCI5825 Final post

Responses to Week 6 Questions.

1. At the beginning of the semester, I had no familiarity with instructional technology.  My comfort level with technology was also low.  I would say that I had a steep learning curve over the course of the semester, as the course helped me achieve a level of comfort with several important technologies:  the smart board, the wiki and i-movie.  In particular, the wiki was the most user friendly tool and the most useful in terms of what I would use in my teaching practice.  I see the wiki as a place to gather useful resources and information and present it in a format with which students can interact.

2. Because all of this technology was completely new to me,  my learning with them was necessarily experimental.  I feel that some of my products are works in progress and will continue to improve.  The instructor did a good job of showing models of the different kinds of things we created so that the standard of work was high.

3. I definitely feel that I am comfortable moving forward in using the Smart Board, the wiki, and i-movie.  In fact, this was one of the greatest benefits of the class for me: improving my comfort level with these technologies.

Using Google reader to read classmates blogs

As I read through my classmates blogs, I was impressed by the level of work that has been undertaken by all of us over the past six weeks.  Many of my classmates are quite versant in technology and have been a great help to me over the past six weeks.  Google reader is a great tool that allowed me to go through a number of blog posts and pick out ones that seemed relevant to me.

For example, I noticed that Emily also liked the "Knowing Poe" website as much as I did so I browsed around some of the other websites she mentioned and added some of her suggestions as additional teacher resources to my wiki.  I also liked a website that Barb mentioned, "Dr. Math" as it has on-line descriptions of how to solve specific math problems at all ages and stages.  This could be a very helpful resource for a special education teacher.

One thing in particular I noticed about myself as I went through these blogs is the usefulness of my wiki as an organizing tool for many of the resources and ideas I have developed over the past six weeks and would like to use as a teacher.  After going through my classmates blogs, I think I would like to create another wiki, or perhaps expand the same one beyond language arts, to include math pages and perhaps learning skills pages.  It seems like a great way to build a personal resource bank for my use as a special education teacher.