Now that the semester is ending, how do you feel about technology in general?

I feel that technology is something that can be used in your everyday life to make tasks simpler and life easier. Since I have had the opportunity to use technology all my life, I feel comfortable adopting new technology as it is made available.

Do you feel different than when you started this class?

I feel that I have sharpened my skills with the various Microsoft office programs we have used in class. In addition I feel that I can use these programs to create useful documents that can be used within the classroom to help with organization and teaching.

How do you feel about integrating technology in your teaching?

I feel that having technology integrated with daily activities within the classroom will help facilitate the learning process by immersing the kids in an environment where they are not only learning what is being taught, but also learning the technology they are working with.

Unit plan Experience

The unit plan is a useful tool that will help with organizing the material that I plan to teach. I knew that technology would play an important part in my Unit Plan, because I am naturally inclined to use technology in my day to day tasks. However, trying to integrate technology into that is useful to not only, but to the students was challenging. I chose to use technology that everyone in the class would be familiar with, and instead of grading them on how well they could use the technology I graded them on how they incorporated information into it.

Crazy Week

This past week and the next few weeks are going to be really busy and stressful. I am wrapping up my studies to sit for the first part of the CPA exam and will be finishing my exams for semester. I hope I will be able to get everything accomplished that I need to.

Website

I made my website using the Digication web application. The application the whole process very simple. I have made websites in the past with pure html coding while in high school and also with MacroMedia's Dreamweaver. The website made with pure html coding was challenging, but helped me in the future with visualizing how layouts are supposed to be and with technical issues such as broken links. Digication's pre-made layouts allows the user to focus entirely adding content and probably to be more productive in the end.

Technology in the classroom

As we explore the many different ways in which we as teachers can facilitate technology in the classroom I have began to think of the limitations and frustration it could bring as well. The main limitation of it would be teaching in a school that was not fortunate enough to have up to date technology with easy access to the students. This would limit the type of activities that would allow students to get the kind of exposure that is necessary in order to learn how to use the software to create support items.

Microsoft Publisher

Microsoft Publisher is an easy to use program that allows the creation of many items such as brochures, flyers, newsletters, and other items that would be difficult to format in a program such as Word. I have used publisher in the past to create a newsletter, and for this current project a student produce handout that will correlate to the students presentation. The handout is a supplement item to the presentation that will contain all the important information so the students can listen to the presentation and not have to worry about taking notes. I found that making this handout was pretty simple and straight forward. All the different options with the text boxes and the arrangement of them made displaying information very easy.

However, uses for the classroom in my mind would be beneficial to the teacher and not so much the student. The student will more than likely not have very easy access to computer with the program installed, nor the technical know how to create document within publisher. Since the class being taught is western civ and not business technology I do not see how students would be able to learn enough to create something useful and productive for my time and theirs. Uses for the teacher however are limitless. One of the things that comes to mind immediately would be parental handouts, and handouts to the students that make information standout and is not lost long paragraphs, or lectures that the students attention and sometimes wane from.

The use and learning of Powerpoint

The PowerPoint exercises taught me something that I have always wanted to know how to do, but just did not know how to do it. That being the creation of the master template. In the past I have used the templates that are provided and did not know how to change anything on them and thus had lackluster presentations that were not exciting.

Now that I know how to create a master template I will be able to use this knowledge to make presentations that are fun to look at and teach from. I believe this is important because the students will be more likely to be engage in the presentation especially if they know it is custom designed for what they are learning.