My EDM 310 Blog Assignments are Now Complete

Thanks to all my fellow classmates, especially Sandy and Ashley. I have had a great time getting to know you and learning about new technologies we can all use in our classrooms. I hope you all have a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! See you in 2009!!

EDM 310 Critique

I have enjoyed this EDM 310 class and I have learned so many things about technology and its uses in my future classroom. I must say, and Dr. Strange knows this best, that Picasa was my favorite thing about the semester. He taught us how to manipulate this program in such a way that I have tons of new photos all over my house and in my scrapbooks. However, not only can I use this program in my home, it will be great to be able to create collages and scrapbook pages of each and every classroom full of children that I have.

Picasa is a Google based program and I also learned that Google offers so many FREE things for us to access. It is a wonderful tool that needs to be used by all. I have even spread the news of this with teachers at my daughter's school and with relatives who are using some of the programs now.

I enjoyed blogging as well. I was a big skeptic at first because of having children and hearing only bad things about other programs, however, I feel this can be a useful tool for teachers and enable them to communicate with their students as well as with parents.

All in all this was a great class. I feel the beginning of the semester was very laid back and then felt a bit pushed toward the end, but that was easily overcome.

Thanks Dr. Strange for a great semester!!

Technology Used By California Teacher

I spoke to a Ms. Leticia Elias from Redwood Middle School in Thousand Oaks, California several times in the month of October. Ms. Elias is a Life Science teacher at Redwood and states that she uses technology in her classroom on a daily basis. Upon further questioning, I did learn that although she uses technology in her classroom daily, it is more of a teacher tool rather than a student tool.

These are some excerpts from an email between Ms. Elias and me, " I also have a LCD projector mounted on my ceiling. The LCD projector is connected to my computer, my DVD/VHS player, and my visualizer. I'm not sure if you are familiar with
visualizers. They are document cameras, which means you can place any
regular textbook, worksheet, picture, etc. below the camera and the
visualizer is constantly taking a picture and projecting it on the
screen like a video camera.

I use the visualizer, LCD projector and my computer to teach each day.
I have Internet access on my computer so I can show any science video
clips and interactive websites I find online on the LCD projector."

She told me that her school is very similar, if not better equipped with technology, than other schools in her area. I asked Ms. Elias about several of the iTunes podcasts that we listened to this semester and the Google tools that we also used, but she seemed very unfamiliar with these and stated she had never used them before.

I was actually very surprised at the use or maybe "lack of" use of what I considered technology in her classroom. I guess I kind of figured that us Gulf Coast, Easterners, were "behind the times" when it came to California. But I am glad to say that with the education our class received this semester about tools and technology, we've got one up on them!!