Blog post 4

I am not sure about the other course later this summer, so I will focus on the technology I would like to utilize beginning in the 2013-14 school year. As much of the current literature on education illustrates, today's classrooms are filled with students who are tech savvy and heavily reliant on technology. Because of that reality, I would like to introduce the use of a wiki in my classroom. The use of a wiki in my classroom really intrigues me, and using it in this class has been a tremendous learning experience for me. I believe it can be an excellent way of capturing and maintaining student attention to assignments. One way I plan to use it is to chart students' responses to reading a text and interacting with it via the wiki. For instance, this school year we read "The Giver" and scripted responses and reactions to the book in journals. This was effective, but could be made more so through the implementation of at technology such as this. Much like with Blackboard for this doctoral program, using the wiki can allow students struggling with their responses to use another students' work as a model to complete the assignment. The wiki would give students who have online access a chance to "journal" at home as well.

Using the wiki could also allow my classroom to interact with other classrooms in my school and district, not to mention beyond. I am excited about this prospect and hope that it yields favorable results.

Blog post 3

There  are numerous areas of technology in general that befuddle and stymie me, but I suppose I should narrow the focus a bit. I would like to learn more about the effective implementation of YouTube in the classroom. This is also the literature review that I elected to do for this class (with Jeremy). Currently, I do utilize YouTube in my classroom, however, because BCSD filters out this particular site, I have to save the videos to a flash drive in order to show it to my classes. This may seem like a commonplace task for many, but I still am uncomfortable with this practice and often, inadvertently, fail to correctly save videos. It has really been embarrassing at times. Also, I have had the pleasure of watching videos produced by some of my colleagues throughout the district and would like to eventually place review lessons, information absent students, and parental correspondence in video format on YouTube. I want to dramatically increase parent participation in my classroom and, hopefully, using YouTube can provide me with another medium to achieve that goal, in addition to email, written letters and phone calls.

Blog post 2

 This process of completing this assignment was reflective and thought provoking for me. During the course of sharing my tech journey in class, I discovered that my family (specifically my brother and sister) was an integral part of not only my technological journey, but many of my significant life experiences (no duh!). Previously, those memories had escaped me. One of my take aways from this assignment is that I have a more varied and decorated exposure to electronic technology than I'd previously thought. From my colleagues (the three with whom I spoke), I discovered that family is was also a key component in ushering them along their journeys, both technologically speaking and in general. The timeline for this assignment revealed to me that my family was often on the cutting edge! Another key take away is that my family has been and remains the impetus for the jubilation I sometimes feel when discovering new learnings.