Jing

Jing is actually probably my favorite tool we learned this week. I love that you can do screen tutorials. I have made a quick tutorial and I'm going to attempt to embed it several places in several different ways.

Tech plans for next year

So I plan to have a teacher website. I've been building it slowly. So far I have some skeleton pages on there. I won't be able to fill it up until I find out exactly what and whom I'll be teaching. But I know that I want to do a project on scale models with my fourth graders. So I am also building a webquest for them. I also want to incorporate some of the video making tools we've learned to help kids with reading comprehension and story recall and retell. I have a lot to think about. I hope that I can remember all that we've learned. It's frustrating to learn a lot of new stuff all at once, and then not be able to try it out immediately. It was great for me to be able to re-use my Google skills in this class, as I was forgetting and then remembering how to do things.

Edge-ucators

I guess I would consider myself an edge-ucator in that I am very fluid in my course designs. I have a basic framework of where I want to go, what topics I want to teach. But sometimes I throw it all out the window to focus on other things. For example, this year I decided to focus more on teaching Vermont geography, and spent a long time on that. I used lots of web resources, Google Apps, Google Maps, videos, websites to help me teach. I gave students projects, but I focused the projects so that their research was meaningful and not just haphazard. I tried to teach them about good web etiquette and reliable sources.