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.