Final Thoughts

I really liked this class. I thought the activities were wonderful because they were so much different than what other classes require. It was really nice to have a bit of variety and they were fun projects to do. I think I learned a lot in this class and I would definitely recommend it to other students. Thank you for a wonderful semester.

Second Last Post

The Story time strand was much more interesting than the Team Captains. They were kind of boring but interesting as well because they contained a good amount of information. Not only did they provide useful information but they also gave me ideas that I can use for presentations and reminded me of things that I do not want to do in presentations. I may watch a few more if I have time. I am working on the iSafe certification and hope to finish it by tomorrow.

Social Networking

I am still not convinced by Richardson that social networking like facebook or twitter has a place in education. Someone brought up a great point about the impact that social networking can have on teachers. Everyone must be careful what they share online these days, especially on facebook. It is even more important for those in the education field to protect themselves because even the most innocent thing put up on facebook or twitter can have bad consequences. Personally, I am very careful with who I am friends with, what pictures go up, and what I put in status updates. I also have my account protected because I don't want the wrong person to stumble upon something that they may find inappropriate even if I don't see any problems with it.

Professional Development Workshop

Finally, Sunday is here! I am so happy to have finished everything for my professional development workshop. I decided to go with the Windows 7 tools. I was able to learn a lot about the tools that I presented on. I hope that this is a workshop that teachers would find helpful/useful for their classrooms or even at home. Many of these tools are tools that I overlooked for a long time until I had to use them for something or they were shown to me by various people. After learning how to use these tools I use them a lot more often for a variety of tasks. The only tools that I do not use on a regular basis are the Math Input Tool (but it is really cool) and the magnifier unless I want to look at something very closely.

Professional Development

Trying to figure out what I want to do for the professional development workshop is proving difficult. My original idea of looking at databases may not work. I was looking around for free databases that may be useful for teachers to use for students but I'm not finding the quality that I was originally looking for. My other thought was windows tools but can i really spend enough time talking about the different windows tools and applications? My last thought comes from the suggestion in the syllabus in web 2.0 tools. Blogging and video sharing sites are becoming more and more important in the classroom and a focused professional development on one of those topics could be very useful to some teachers.

Pictures of students

One of the important things that I think was brought up this week about obstacles we may face is that of pictures on our library website. I believe that posting pictures of students and their work will prove difficult. I think it will be important that we are careful with what we share on our website and that we respect the wishes of parents who do not wish that their children have their pictures online. I think we can find a balance between posting pictures of children and just sharing their work online.

TPACK

I really liked the post from Emily Richards this week. It was very thought provoking. I could see librarians going into classrooms just like she and her father talked about to analyze teaching styles and what come up with technologies that would complement them. This could even go as far as being a profession in itself (I don't know if there is one out there already). Consultants or analysts that went into schools to observe teaching styles and then could recommend technologies or  changes in teaching styles to become more effective could be worthwhile for schools.