Week 3 All Finished!

This third week in ICT class was a pretty laid back week. We started working on our websites. After discussing different websites to assist us with this, I decided to go with weebly.net. Since this is my first time making a website I chose weebly.net because it has a variety of templates to get you started. As well, adding and editing pages has been pretty easy. The biggest problem I have faced so far is just finding pictures without copyright restrictions.

Here are a couple screenshots of my website. Since it is still a work in progress, I have yet to publish it so I cannot supply the link for it yet.

Also since there wasn't a whole lot to report on in this week I thought i'd add a video that we watched in week 2!

Week 2 in ICT Education!

Well after week 2 finished I realized that each class we are covering so many different and useful topics and subjects that is going to be extremely important just so we have a slight idea how to use each of the new sites or applications.

The week started off with us looking at a few examples of eportfolios which was great because we got to see former education students actual portfolios that they have used to help get themselves jobs. Each one was different in their own way so it was encouraging for us to be creative and individualize ours. 

We also talked about the 3 C’s of the Internet: Create, Communicate, Collaborate! I have come to realize I am a little bit of a rookie when it comes to using the  internet with my major experience in creating stuff only coming in the form of creating an email account and facebook account so creating eportfolios and a website is an adventure I am looking forward to! Using the internet to communicate is extremely popular these days with applications like skype, and it is becoming popular in the classroom too. I had attended a p.d last semester and the presenter was a kindergarten teacher who used skype to talk to other classes and even talked to some classes in NewYork. The most helpful C is definitely Collaborate. I intend to stay in touch with my peers over the years to come so we are able to share new ideas and programs with each other. I believe that you can never have too many resources and the fact that they are in the same boat as you just gives more reason to work with them.

I think I am going need a lesson redo for wednesday lesson because our guest speakers Andy and Darren showed us so much so quick. They gave us a quick overview of why technology is important in the education system of today, and showed us some ways to help create pictures for our websites and portfolios. We used the websites compfight.com and pixlr.com. We used compfight.com to find our picture that was not registered or copyrighted by using the creative commons filter. Once we found our picture we used pixlr.com to edit it to our liking.

Well that was the second week of ICT class! 

First Time for Everything

Well here goes nothing....

This is my first time ever making a blog post, in fact i’ve never even read a blog before so this is all very new to me.

This first week in our ICT class was very interesting. We jumped right into things by looking at the course syllabus and by making a word cloud about ICT in the classroom using a program called wordle. I thought this was really interesting activity and can be very useful in the classroom! It gets kids using technology, it can be used as an assessment tool for figuring out what kids already know about a particular subject so it’s a great brainstorming tool. I also like how it is just not writing it down on a piece of paper, or some black and white hand out. The kids can design it the way they like it, and they are on a computer which most kids these days love.

The next day we look at a program called wallwisher which is like an interactive cork board where students are able to type something out and it appears on everybody else’s computers. I thought it was a really interesting way of communicating and plan on using it in a classroom setting, even for a phys ed class. Students could just log on in the evenings and say what they thought of the class, what they didn’t like about it, what would they like to work on tomorrow? It would allow easy communication from student to teacher or vice versa outside of school hours.

Later on in the week we looked at using technology professionally and creating our eporfolios. I am excited to create an eportfolio for the experience and to demonstrate that I am able to use technology to my advantage. I think the more we are able to demonstrate our knowledge of technology and our ways to utilize it our classrooms the more our future employers will be impressed.

Well, that was it! My first blog post! Hope you enjoyed it!