540 wk 1

Wow! I hate stats. I am not a big fan of math even though my grades in the past have not been bad, but it does not come quickly to me at all. I took an accelerated stats class in college, got like a B+ or A- and hated it. I am not sure what the correlation is between this class and the rest of the program, but I am eager to find out. I do not collect any data or use a lot of stats in my life or classroom. I will from time to time review a statistical finding that interests me, but I could definitely live without it. I have had my doubts about other classes over that last 10 months, but I will find it difficult to make this useful in my daily life. I will keep an open mind because I do view myself as a lifelong learner, but the outlook is bleak.

535 WK 5

This week there are a few things that I can translate into my professional and personal life. I have found myself slightly enjoying Richardson's book and agreeing with a lot of what he says. There were a lot of good points in chapter 9 that made me reflect upon what we have learned. One of the bennefits of using web education is that not only are these great tools to enhance education, but mastery of these technologies comes as a byproduct of that education. Students that use technology in school become even more comfortable with it in life.
I also took some time to explore other web 2.0 tools that we didn't necessarily cover in class. Social bookmarking sites like Diigo and Delicious are very useful for myself and my students. Media sharing and storing sites like Flickr, Zoto, and Pixorial make it easy to share, edit and store pictures and video. These tools are things that I plan to put to use in my technology classes. Any tool that I can use that is web based that allows for easy storage and access of materials.
As we progress through this program I am pleasantly surprised to find more and more useful tools for myself and my students. Web 2.0 tools will not only enhance my information delivery systems, but excite students about technology tools and the content that I teach.

535 wk 4

This is kind of an interesting week for me. I am crazy busy right now at school and with my personal life and I was dreading even starting our homework this week. As you may notice I always post my blog by at the latest Friday afternoon and here we are Saturday morning. Might not seem like a big deal, but for me its crazy. I am excited to start my Ning, I finally made the desicion and I am ready to get started. I also found screencasting to be really cool. It is something that I had done once a long, long time ago and forgot how to even do. I used ScreenCastle and it was AWESOME! Really easy to use and I recorded the steps to setting up a blogger account. I plan to use this screencast shortly when I get my kids ready to start blogging. I also thought the conversation about crowdsourcing was interesting and I was really interested in the R&D innocentive site. This week was very busy, but very useful for me.