Final Evaluation Blog

The most useful technology I think that I will use in the future from this course was learning Mindmiester. I think that will be a great tool for me in my future classrooms because even since I was in high school, education has become a lot more high tech and this would be a great tool for sharing ideas with other students in the classroom and doing group work to develop analysis. I think a skill that can be difficult to teach and that is often overlooked is that of analyzing works of literature. It is easy to see connections when the teacher presents them, but it is much harder to find them on your own. I have trained my mind to do that but I am still working on it and I'm getting ready to finish the English program here at BYU. I think that Mindmiester is a great tool for that because it will allow students to get into groups and share ideas and analysis with very little directing from me so that students will be able to develop that skill, which I feel is so vital in learning to appreciate literature and the value that it has.

I think I will also use the video creating technology that we used to create the instructional videos. That's a great way to help students learn to create tutorials and videos and it's a great way for me as a teacher to create tutorials or instructional videos for the students so that they can learn at home and in the classroom by instruction. I had no idea that those tools were available and beyond using them in the classroom, which I think will be very useful, I will also use them in my personal life as I need to create videos for any other reason.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, I will learn to use new technologies as they become available by going online and watching as many tutorials as I can find so that I will be able to better understand features that aren't extremely self explanatory. I am lucky in that my job exposes me to a lot of new technologies and I have had a lot of experience in learning on my own how to use different programs. So, it is not very hard for me to figure out how to use new technologies on my own, but when I need help, I have discovered that there are plenty of resources out there. I will be able to look up the tutorials online, but I will also be able to go to my blog or others' blogs and discussion boards and all kinds of things in my networks to better use the new technology. Networks where ideas and new knowledge can be shared will be increasing valuable to me, I'm sure.

Before implementing new technologies, I will first learn how to use them to the best of my ability as discussed above, and then I will determine whether or not using this technology will be useful in furthering the educational goals that I have already set for the class and the students. If the technology is something that is interesting and cool but that doesn't help the class reach the educational goals that are set for it, then the technology is not of enough worth to be used in the classroom. It may be very useful in other contexts, but it will be important for me to evaluate how a technology can aid in learning and not how it can be the main event in an assignment. I will also probably focus on using simple technologies that are easy to learn because I will be teaching English and will want to focus mainly on the curriculum, not on learning new programs. One other thing that will help me determine the usefulness of future technologies is actually applying and using them in the classroom and seeing whether or not they are effective in doing what I hoped they would.

Google Reader Tutorial

Ever since I started looking up tutorials for Mindmeister and my final project, I have found a few others for things that we learned earlier and that I may have been struggling with. Searching for tutorials on Google is a great way to learn how to do things, but more importantly, learn new things that you might not have realized were there before in the program. This particular tutorial that I found is really useful in explaining how to use Google Reader. I was interested in this because when I got a Google reader account or whatever early in the semester, I thought it seemed really useful but wasn't really sure how to best use it. It was easy enough to figure out but there are so many other features that I didn't know about the first time I went through. So, that is where the tutorials come in handy. For instance, this tutorial teaches you how to subscribe to newspapers, which I didn't know you could do, but that I would be interested in. I think looking up tutorials for new programs will be something I do in the future when I have classes of my own so that I can master them to the best of my ability and be able to teach my students how to use as many features as possible so that they will understand the usefullness of certain programs.