My Final Post

I learned many things this semester in EDM, and most importantly I learned how to use them in the classroom in order to make my students' journey through education as enriching as possible. This semester, I learned how to use all of the following programs and tools: Word Documents, presentations such as Powerpoint, spreadsheets such as Excel, blogs, podcasts,programs such as ALEX and ACCESS, RSS feeds, hyperlinks,and sites like Google and Wikipedia.

A few of them were more important than others and I spent long amounts of time practicing them. We spent the entire semester learning about Blogs and how they can be helpful to students and teachers. We kept up with our class blogs, adding required posts every week, as well as a professional blog that should us how to use the Internet as a job resource. ALEX and ACCESS are programs that we need to know about when we get into our professions and we spent a lot of time discussing how these things are helping our grade school youth make it to graduation. Spreadsheets and word documents also gave us the chance to use software in real world situations, showing how these things can be helpful in our everyday life as well as work.

I do feel like there are some things we could have spent time on that we didn't in the course. One of those would be web pages. I would have to have learned how to create a web page that I can eventually use as a resource for my students, including notes they may have missed and maybe links to other sites and resources they could use in their studies. I would have also been interested in discussing how to incorporate technology into curriculum in places where funds can be low and resources scarce, so that I would be able to see that my students got the best knowledge of technology possible, even in poor conditions.

Overall I do feel like I took away a substantial amount of knowledge from this class about things that I previously did not know existed, or did not know how to use very well. The class allowed me to learn new techniques that will help me become the best educator possible and therefor generate a better understanding of subject matter to my students. I enjoyed the semester!