A Month in Review

I cannot believe that a month has passed since I started in the Teacher Education program. I knew this year was going to be a lot of work but no one told me how much.  I feel like I have 8 million things to do everyday and there really are not enough hours in the day to do it all.  Despite complaining about my work load, I feel like I have learned so much and have had great experiences with some amazing people in this short time.

Of course, my favourite class so far is my technology class where I am learning how to integrate the latest technology into the classroom.  The class is amazingly interactive and I have learned things that I never knew existed.  Two weeks ago we had a presentation by Lisa Neale who is a 21'st century system principal helping to make sure that technology is used, and used appropriately in the classroom.  But whats crazy is that she's a grandmother.  It takes my father about an hour to send me one email!  Anyways, Lisa's presentation was amazing and incredibly useful.  Zoe, our instructor setup an Elluminate Live chat, which, allowed us to be interactive during Lisa's presentation. We could chat with each other and post things we liked and to my surprise I was able to both listen and follow along with the message board.  If someone missed something, someone else posted it so we could all have the notes from the session.

At the end of the presentation, I got to meet Lisa, which, for me was really special as she is also my Virtual Associate Teacher and my partner in learning about 21'st century technologies for the classroom.  I asked Lisa about Web 2.0, something she mentioned during her presentation and she told me to research it and report back to her.  Luckily, Zoe went over this in the next class and I figured out that Web 2.0 is a name given to the type of interaction one has with a website.  In Web 1.0, a user creates a website that gives information but cannot be commented on or responded to.  On the other hand, Web 2.0 allows a website viewer to respond to information on a website such as blogs or comments on a newspaper site.  

We also learned how to create google sites (Dean's Site), docs and calendars, and learned how they can be useful in the classroom.  I wish that this stuff had existed when I was in school.  The interactive classroom to me, is so important and I hope that I will be able to use technology successfully alongside my students.