Lessons+Learned

__** Lessons Learned **__ A personal reflection over the content and what I have learned from this class. The outcomes and objectives of this course have greatly impacted my teaching toolbox. Being that I am a Career and Technical Educator with an endorsement in business education, I found that exploring these various tools has opened up many different opportunities for me to incorporate more technology into my classroom.

A lot of the tools we have explored in this four week class, I have had previous exposure to. Being that I have grown up through the initial advancement of the technology age, I feel very confident in my ability to incorporate and use many of these tools. What I didn't really realize, is the value that each tool can offer to students, parents, teachers, and instruction. Whether it is working with a webpage, protopage, wikispace, or iGoogle homepage, they all have varying degrees of application to both teachers and students. I personally found working with a wikispace to be the most valuable tool we explored in this class. A wikispace gives you the option of incorporating so many of these tools into one space, where students can come to explore and learn. We used protopage for our learning space, and it got the job done, but I don't think it is the most user-friendly space for students to work with. Often times I found myself getting lost with all the tabs and windows that would overlay on each other. Plus it seems to easy for people to come and change your page. However with a wiki, even though membership is sometimes required, it is much more manageable and can basically utilize all the same widgets and xml that a protopage can.

To me the tools that hold the most value are the ones that allow for online collaboration. These tools include wikis, online document processing, blogs, and surveys. There is so much that can be done and attained through each of these tools, and I will probably try to incorporate each of them into my future classroom web-space. The last thing that I would like to reflect upon, relates to screencasting. I have used several tutorials where screencasting has helped me work through a task, but I have never actually created one. After downloading and using some of the different screencasting software available like CamStudio, Wink, and Jing I realized just how simple it was to create a basic tutorial for my students. Once the video was rendered and uploaded, my mind started racing with lessons/content that I could easily screencast for my students. I found this tool to be fairly user-friendly and have unlimited potential.

In conclusion, the one aspect that this class has proven to me is the power of creating an online learning space. Even though it takes a lot of time upfront in the creation of an online learning space, the value of time saving in the future is exponential. Once the learning space is created, it simply needs to be updated and managed. Plus the value that can come from an online learning space is tremendously impactful on student learning. By having something that is accessible from anywhere and at anytime, so many doors are opened to students, teachers, and parents alike. The only thing that I would try to incorporate into this class is a little bit on online servers for hosting larger files. Other than that I found this class to be very eye-opening even though my eyes had already been exposed.