April 9th

textbook 241-245

I had to leave early last class so I didn’t get to watch too many of the videos. However, from the couple that I watched, I realized how very different and varied they were even if we all had the same assignment! Ghada and I decided to do it as a commercial/collage on the moments of truth during ones life; our inspiration was my pregnancy. The other team’s inspiration was completely different; they were inspired from a book on rice, and that’s why they decided to film themselves making rice. The other group wanted to make it useful for teaching, so they decided to film themselves teaching a science lesson. Using movie maker isn’t very hard; however like with any other technology, it sometimes just doesn’t want to work! So we had to be patient and find tricks to make it work. One of the glitches was adding a title to a slide; if we made a small mistake, it would mix up the whole video and we would almost have to start all over. However, the most challenging part was to grab the video from utube and transforming it into a file instead of a website. We had to download a program off the internet and we got some help from Ghada’s cousin on this part.

Without any doubt, this class broadened my horizons about technology and its different uses in the classroom. As I stated in my first blog, I was very scared of using any type of technology because I felt like I just knew the basics so how would I teach children to use it. However, at the end of this class, I realize that I have gained confidence and I now know that I can use technology and help is out there if I need it. As the textbook states, it has given us example of how to use technology in to engage in meaningful learning; however it did not show us how to use the software (p.241). This was the course’s job! We were able to play around with the technology in the classroom and learn how to use it in our classroom. I never knew that creating a website can be so simple! I actually did my whole website on my own; I first thought that I would ask help from everyone and this was definitely not the case. So I am definitely proud of myself and I can say that I will use much more technology in my classroom than I initially thought that I would. As mentioned by Jonassen et al., we need to believe in our students and give them responsibility and ownership in the knowledge building. They can definitely do that with the help of technology. Also, they mention that with technology comes risk; these activities involve risk and I need to take these risks because they are worth it because the outcome might be great (p.243)! Technology is very prevalent in our society and as Jonassen mentions, teachers need to get away from the “standard and regular” ways of teaching, and use technology to enhance their teaching (p.245). I can honestly say that I am willing to start my teaching career with the “new” way of teaching and almost forget about the standard blackboard teaching.