This is an experiment using Word 2007 to create blog posts.

Day 5

There has been a lot of information to try and absorb this week. I have tried a number of new things and I think I will be able to use many of these new technologies in my teaching in the coming school year; I just hope I get better at it. Once again, time is going to be one of the limiting factors involved in getting many of these things off the ground. I don't want to put lousy material out there if I get to teach an online course. I want it to be quality curriculum and that takes time. I also want to put good stuff in the podcasts and other materials that I create.

TIME!!!!

Day 4

On-line learing was one of the main reasons I took this class. The wide variety of content and curriculum out there is amazing. It is also disappointing to see how much crap is out there as well. I suppose that it is just like everything else on the internet - some good, a lot of bad.

The amount of time needed to develop high quality materials to be used in on-line courses seems to more than I have available to me. It will be a challenge to come up with something that I can teach on-line and make it interesting enough to attract students.

I think the primary reason our district wants to develop on-line courses was to keep our kids from going elsewhere and to attract kids from other districts to take classes from us so we can keep and get more money.

Day 3

I can think of a number of ways to use the videos similar to the ones we created in class on the football team website. It turns into a bit of a slideshow, but I think it would make the whole thing more interesting.

As for using these in class - the possibilities seem to be endless. I can envision the narrating the process of creating a function using the Design Recipe for my computer science classes and posting that on a wiki. The kids could always refer to that if the get stuck. Always having something for them to refer back to that models the style that I want to see is going to be helpful. It is also something the parents could see to help explain what it is we are actually doing in my computer science classes.

Day 2 Reflections

There are a lot of things to consider; a lot of tools to look at to see which ones are going to be the most effective (and hopefully easiest) to use in my classes. I am leaning toward a wiki for the computer science classes, and creating my own blog for each class; posting problems and having kids repsond to them. I am not sure about a wiki for the math classes - that might be a good place for a problem of the week. I will have to do some thinking over the next month.

First Day

Monday was the first time that I have ever posted something on a wiki. Even though it was only for this class, it looks like it is something that I could use for all my classes at OHS. It would be nice for kids to be able to communicate with me and the rest of their classmates and this might be a way of opening the lines of communication.

The neatest thing I found while digging around was a link to something called "23 things on a stick". This was an activity that gave people 23 tasks related to using and learning about Web 2.0 tools. I am too late to join the contest (and since I don't work for a library would probably not be eligible anyway), but I might try to go through these tasks just to get some more experience in using these tools.

http://23thingsonastick.blogspot.com/