Last day (of course and February) reflections

Now I have even more applications and sites to learn about: Moodle, Ning, Teacher tube, voice threads, Twitter (“Tweets”), the Black Cloud project, Google Calendar, and Google Groups.
Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss suggest:

--Kids don’t know how to interact in a responsible manner and that lots of attention needs to be directed to help them with this. For this reason and to avoid being sued, many schools in the US and Australia are now blocking social networking sites like we have at ISB—even Google images. We are fortunate.

--If technologies are leading the way for the development of a project, it is time to reconsider the technology. This is a good idea. Inappropriate technologies make students and teachers shy of technological use, are time and energy consuming, and hinder, rather than assist student learning.

--It’s too late to interact with students when they have already developed a project (Like a PowerPoint or Document). The teachable moment is gone. The learning interactions (with the teacher of other students) that assist students need to be contained within the processing of their work. I am happy this was addressed in the IB Environmental Systems project I developed for this course.

The discussion about how much time technology takes from teacher’s days leaves me feeling I need to read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I recall seems to address how to tackle time budgeting of one’s projects.

The collaboration among students is most useful. I liked the discussions in the class today. They reflect the good discussions on blogs. I particularly like the insight John Breedlove and Senor Denby gave. John gave me five minutes of his time to discuss how I could set up a Google.forms idea I have. Again he is an amazing resource in this course. I look forward to seeing his Google.Earth project.

The educational literature for the reading link to the Foothill de Anza Community College is an excellent synopsis of current beacons in education and I thank the course leaders for giving us that link as a resource and assignment. It helped put the project into relevant context for the new technologies (and review what we covered earlier in this course, but I forgot about.)

We teachers will always be taking time to learn the better way to help our students learn and understand using technologies. I predict the last course in this Master’s program will be about the effective use of a tech tool or technique that has not even been developed yet. And we will all see how it will effectively help our students. (Here at ISB, we will probably have access to it.) With the rate of new developments, we teachers will always be dealing with a conflict of how much time to dedicate to keeping up.