My view on instructional technology has changed a bit over the course of the semester; while I found that a lot of the material was not designed for agricultural education, I found that I could easily alter a lot of the resources to make it suitable for my classroom. I think that integrating video making and podcasts could be very beneficial, as well as having my own wiki page for my class. The wiki page could help the most I believe because it can give students clarification to homework assignments or projects or specific links that I want them to view. This has drastically changed from when I was in high school and the most I could do for clarification was to email my teacher and hope they responded back in time for me to get the project done. With the wiki, students can first look at the assignment posted, if that's not clear, they can go on the discussion forum and ask their peers and if that doesn't work, last resort would be to email me through the page or on my email listed on the page, the possibilities are endless really!
In some instances, the appropriateness was a little lacking in some of the material we learned throughout the semester; the voki's were a bit of a stretch for what we are doing and perhaps so was the animoto video, although it's a good ice breaker for us and other students. Otherwise, the video, podcast, wiki, jing and the assessment tools can potentially be very very helpful, and I believe that if teachers invest some of their time into these projects, they can make the classroom interactive, fun and an overall good learning experience.
Overall, I feel great with the technology we have used, and I feel confident going ahead and using them outside of this class. With technology I am a quick learner and adapted quickly to the material, so I think I will also be able to use what we learned and continue to make it better throughout my career.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
EDCI 5825 Week 6
After using Google Reader this week, a whole new world has kind of been opened for me. I can read so many ideas and thoughts at the click of a button, and it's fascinating! I now understand too how teachers can view 40+ students' blogs without having to go blog by blog, which makes it a lot easier.
I saw some very neat and in depth blogs when I looked over the classes' blogs; I saw a lot more interaction such as in Dave's and Meghan's blogs, where they post a lot of pictures and quotes and other relative material. In Meghan's blog, the use of staggered text really helps the reading aspect of the blog instead of just one paragraph. It helps the overall reading and helps the reader connect more to the material.
I think that in the future I will definitely try to post relative material so that people reading can connect more to what I am talking about- videos, links and pictures would help a lot! It looked great in my classmates blogs so I think I'll have to use that!
An idea that stood out was in 'A to Zed's' blog, where in there T2P they said students should be encouraged to take risks in the classroom. While this to the extreme can be hazardous, I believe students should be able to explore and take risks so that they can learn on their own and get out of their comfort zone so that they can really learn new material. Of course I have to be careful in an ag-ed setting because risks are everywhere, especially in hands on material, so a healthy balance of risk taking should be admitted in my classroom so no harm can occur.
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