EIT - Final Reflection

Over the last several weeks, I have expanded my knowledge on emerging instructional technologies. Most of them, I had no idea they even existed. This class has driven me to learn about different technologies and how they could be incorporated into a classroom setting. I like the challenge it presented by encouraging me to expand my comfort zone from known concepts to unknown. Overall, this week has been one of many accomplishments. I loved having our guest speakers Skype into our classroom. It is amazing what can be done with all the different types of technologies available.

Some of the emerging technologies we discussed in class came naturally to use (Google Docs, Google Pages, and PowerPoint.) Since I have a background in business education and have taught students word processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentation software for a few years. This seemed realistic.

A few of the tools required more time to process and learn how to maneuver around. These technologies were blogs, wikis, twitter, ning, video files, Jing, voicethread and Podcast files. I can see me implementing a ning, Jing, voicethread, blog, and/or wikis in my class. These tools provide opportunities for my students to interact in digital native capacity. I liked the possibilities they provided.

I have learned that I am capable of learning new concepts and applying them to my classroom instruction. Some of the concepts/skills required more practice than others to learn – like Second Life. (This virtual world has so many layers to it. It will take quite some time to discover all the components and their uses it possesses.) One of the benefits of this class was being able to explore the emerging technology right away. I’m a firm believer a person has to do something before they can fully understand it. The learning process for me is accelerated when this can occur.

The group project made it possible for us to complete a Ning fully to see how it could operate in a school setting. Each person of our team had certain tasks they were responsible for in completing. There were so many different ideas for this project is was hard to narrow down our selection. However, through negotiations we came up with doing a Ning for a school to have its faculty utilize it.

For this group project, we had a collaboration page where we shared concepts, ideas and a simple page to post websites, links we had to have posted to the Ning. This simplified the group project immensely. The capability of this tool to immediately update a document was powerful. We posted all our links and information to the Ning for ease of use by the faculty. I enjoyed working with this team of individuals and look forward to the two years ahead of us.

UNI - June 17, 2008

We got to see Skype in all its glory today. We had a Skype conversation with the Ning creator Steve Hargadon. It was a double opportunity to talk face-to-face with this individual and what he has done for social networking by developing Ning, but also seeing Skype in action. This was awesome!!! I enjoyed it so much, I helped my daughter setup our home computer tonight to put it into action. This piece of technology will make the next 2 weeks more bearable for my family to be apart.

After looking at Ning, we focused on virtual worlds. More specifically, we dedicated the day to Second Life. It was great to work with my avatar without it looking like a scarecrow. Now I know my DSL through Frontier isn't all that great after all. I'm understanding better all the possibilities there are with Second Life. It is possible to have meetings and conferences for individuals to collaborate without leaving their homes and/or offices. I was impressed when I was able to find a group of individuals who are instructors in the Cisco Networking Academy. They have a group dedicated to sharing classroom ideas on Second Life. :-)