Thursday's Reflections

The commute into the city keeps getting worse. Two drops of rain and there's chaos on the roads! However, I am always energized when I come into the city. One morning a Mariachi (sp) band came onto the subway and began playing at 8:20 in the morning. That put a smile on my face!

I enjoyed the talks on Second Life and Gaming. They both really do have educational merit. Tomorrow is our final day and our presentations. The week has flown by. I've met some great people and have been introduced to many new technologies. I hope I will be able to implement at least a few of them into my classroom!

Wednesday's Reflections

Well, here we are, more than halfway though the week and the workshop. So far, it has been a terrific experience! I have to admit that yesterday my head was spinning as I attempted to process all this new information - blogging account, twitter account, gmail account, google reader, google docs, wikis, second life, screencasting, social networking, etc. etc. But today I am beginning to feel more comfortable with some of the new technology.

Now at least I know that there are some useful reasons to "twitter." Ning has proven to be very helpful,and people are finding me on Facebook. Although I am tired in the evening, I actually looking forward to creating my nightly blog and reading those of my classmates.

And, on a practical note, by leaving 15 minutes early today I got home an hour earlier - go figure!

Today was the second day of our new technology workshop. Our morning session was a series of e-portfolio demonstrations and a Q&A. I would have liked to have the opportunity to actually try to use some of these tools. I had seen a very similar demonstration of the TaskStream Portfolio system so it seemed a bit repetitive.

Our afternoon session was quite interesting. I really like the way Jim and Beth have scheduled the sessions. They are informative and interactive and the time passes very quickly. Some of the topics discussed included: synchronous and asynchronous learning, distance education/distance learning, and a skype demonstration. I love skype! I get to see my 16 month old granddaughter's development on a weekly basis.  She has figured out that if she turns the screen on and off we  can play "virtual peek-a-boo." I haven't yet used it in an educational application but I am open to suggestions.

Our group put the finishing touches on our project for tomorrow and I look forward to seeing all the groups' work tomorrow. 

Monday's Reflections

Today is the first session of our workshop, "New Technologies for Teaching and Learning." I think the most stressful part so far was learning to re-navigate the subway system in NYC, something I haven't done in a long time. I did manage it successfully and it's fun to be back in the heart of the city.

So far, the class has been quite interesting and we're learning about some of the new technologies and how to implement them. Today we discussed some of the readings, had a clicker demonstration, and talked about our individual and group projects. Right now, I am writing my very first blog.

My hope is to share what I've learned with my teacher education students and to create a project that will be advantageous to my teaching and their learning. I'll be thinking about what the specifics of the individual project will be tonight and hope to have a more concrete idea of what I want to do by tomorrow.