Week 5 - Midterm Reflection

Learning Objective 2:
Promote and demonstrate effective use of digital tools and resources. Familiarize students with Web2.0 tools that may be used professionally or within the classroom environment to establish deeper learning experiences through proper curricular standard driven development.

I have been involved in a lot of the new technology that has come into our building and I am always looking for ways to use it.  I have found that through this class I have seen many uses for the new tools that have been introduced.  I have already been thinking about starting a blog for the craft ideas that I have and love to do.  I know this is not tied to education but in a way I think it could be.  We are starting an enrichment program at our school and I would love to be able to teach kids a craft but then also have a place where we can share our ideas.  I like the idea of a blog for this because it would give kids and people who are interested in crafts a place to share ideas.  I also like the idea of embeding podcasts with directions into the blog.  I think if I can make this idea work then I can probably find some cool ideas to use this in the classroom. 

Learning Objective 5:
Establish a core personal learning network of technology leaders to follow. Utilize this new network of educators as personal professional development.

This is an idea that I feel I have only started to develop but have definetly made strides towards using a PLN to develop my professional development.  I like the idea of Diigo and I was reading an article that described an easy to understand way to use Diigo or Delicious to find others who have used tags to identify sites.  The other thing the article talks about is how to use Twitter to find and follow people to building your network.  I have this basic understanding and I am looking forward to trying this out. 

Learning Objective 6:
Use knowledge of digital tools and technology applications to facilitate experiences that advance learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.

I had originally gotten an incomplete in this class because I had issues outside of class but also because it was very overwhelming with all the tools and how to make it work and how to follow all the parts.  I feel now that I am understanding more about how all these tools are connected and the overarching idea of these tools is to help build a personal learning network to help your learning and understanding of the tools and technology.  This in turn will help me to use them in my classroom.  The more a person is confortable and familiar with a tool they are more likely to use it on a day to day basis.  I was at a workshop about how to use the new Apple Book Air recently and when they started sharing some sites and information the first thing I did was open my Diigo account so I could save them to the site and be able to find them again later.  I loved the use of the tags because I know I will be able to go looking for the sites but all I need to remember is what we were doing at the time.  Then with the article I read about how to use Diigo better made me realize that I can search other peoples sites to find more that will help in my lesson planning for school. 

Overall I am very excited about all the tools we have worked with so far and I am looking forward to the rest of them.  I am especially looking forward to being able to use them in my school.  Since we started the blog through Blogger and Google Reader to keep track of the blogs we are following, I have this idea to introduce it to my collegues as school.  I would like to be able to introduce this to my collegues as a way for use to communicate about things we do in our classroom to help our students because our time to meet face to face is so very limited.  I think we could accomplish a lot and have a great way to share these ideas with each other.  Once this class is done and I have time to work on the presentation to my collegues I am going to bring the idea to my adminstration and see where it takes us.