No Time to Sleep

Near the close of the school year, I was helping one of my students work around a Mac/PowerPoint problem and she asked how many computer classes I had taken. I realized that technically, I have taken one – it was 13 years ago, a 1/2 day workshop required by the school I worked with at the time. We were officially introduced to ClarisWorks, the first half of the morning was spent in the Word Processing portion of the program, the second in the paint application. We cropped a picture of Calvin out of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. There was no mention of copyright, and no obvious application for this tool in the classroom was made.

Next week I will team-teach a Classroom Technology course to 24 MAED students – it will be my first time teaching this specific class. We have four evenings together, and I find myself pondering what will be the most beneficial things for these soon-to-be classroom teachers to know. For that matter, I am not sure what they already know. Beyond theoretical/legal/ethical educational technology topics, I know they have some PowerPoint and iMovie on their syllabus as well as blogging as an assignment and some “Technology-To-Go” items. As I think about all of the tools which could be incorporated, I thought I would open it up to a wider discussion.

What do you think would be the most important to add/include into this course?

I went back and forth before starting this blog, really having no idea what to expect. I have been reading a number of blogs for a while but actually becoming the author carries a lot of pressure – as I anticipated. Figuring out the blogroll , comments, tagging,  linking  (and I do link to sources of information I reference if I have them, that is important), being consistent, writing regularly (not easy for the big time abstract random in me).

Enough reflecting for now. I am sure I will do more as I go.