3: Technology in my classroom

I chose Twitter to critique because we have to use it a lot throughout this class.  Twitter provides many different ways to communicate ideas with others including hashtags, retweets, and tweeting.  Twitter is visually appealing.  The homepage shows the “live feed” which shows tweets and retweets from people you follow.  Many companies have started using twitter for promotional reasons.  The brief tweets are a good and effective way to deliver information to a younger crowd. 

In my classroom, I will utilize online discussion groups.  According to page 204 in chapter 9, discussion groups allow for teachers to directly communicate with students and other teachers.  I think this is important in a classroom because students would be able to feed off of other students’ ideas.  The textbook also discusses a tool called “Collaborize Classroom” which is an online learning platform that allows teachers and students to discuss the learning materials.  Students are able to engage in other discussions of students and become more involved outside of the classroom.  These techniques would probably be more suitable for 4^th grade and up because it requires students to think more outside the box than they may originally in a traditional classroom.

On the newsletter assignment, I learned how to properly format a school newsletter and figure out which types of stories to include.  Before this assignment, I never really thought about making a newsletter for my class.  This assignment also taught me how to make a hyperlink to my email just in case the letter was delivered electronically.  I enjoyed seeing my fellow classmate’s newsletters and it game me ideas that I could use in the future.  

Future tech teachers

As a student, Microsoft Word seems to be a necessity.  Whether I am looking up a teacher's notes on PowerPoint or writing an essay for English class, it always seems to play a large role in my education.  I personally like when teachers supply PowerPoints to their students because I like that it provides a visual resource.  I am a visual learner, so this is more effective for me than just a lecture without any props.

Copyright and fair use of materials has impacted my learning experience.  In high school, my teachers used to post videos of their lectures online which was very helpful to me.  However, they were forced to take these videos down because some of the pictures were copyrighted.  As a teacher, I plan to try my best to create most of my materials on my own and use minimal other resources.  I think this will make a more personal and creative environment in my classroom and I won't have to face copyright charges.

Before taking this class, I never considered twitter as a professional resource.  However, it is a great way to communicate and share ideas with others.  I think it is a good idea for people to have separate twitters for their professional and personal lives.  In the future, I think Twitter would be a great resource for teachers because they can share different links and ideas with other teachers about what they are doing in their own classes.