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.

Using Wikis in the Classroom

For the final project, as you know, we used wikis to post our Lesson Activity Plans. If you click on that, it will take you to mine. I have used wikis before in a class at BYU for posting information of periodicals from the Victorian period. They called it the Viki Wiki and they actually created it at the Center for Teaching and Learning, where I work. I really like wikis because they are easy to use and they allow students to sort of publish their work, especially if you are collaborating with other schools or classes. I think that using wikis in my future classroom would be a great idea when we have assignments on short stories or things that are new and exciting that the students would want to share. I think that not only does it make it easy to share, but it also forces the student to take a certain level of pride in their work, as it is going to be posted online for their classmates as well as others to read and learn from.

Mindmeister Tutorial

I went online to look for tutorials for the program that I'm learning for my project and this was the most useful one I was able to find. It very simply goes through how to create maps and is a great way to get started. I think it would be a great recommendation for anyone starting to use the program or perhaps to show students in a classroom who will begin using this program for something.

Mindmeister Blog

I discovered while I was browsing through the Mindmeister website and trying to familiarize myself with its content, that there is a Mindmeister blog where they share new information about Mindmeister as it comes up. While I only have the free version and so not a lot of the upgrades and promotional things matter to me, unless I become attached and in the future decide to sign up for an account, there are still a lot of useful things on there. They put updates on when the program will be going through changes and so will be down, there is one blog about someone that works with Mindmeister and his experiences with the program. There are also other posts that are more helpful to me, such as the blog entitled, "Online guide to mind map drawing services." This is a great resource and I've added it to my blog list so that I can get updates when they come and will know of any new features or things like that as I learn about his new technology.

Personal Techonology Project: Mindmeister

In deciding what I thought would be the most important and useful technology to learn about for use in my future classroom, I was torn between Accelerated Reader and Mindmeister, but I settled on Mindmeister because I felt that it would be useful for students to use in their learning and I also felt that I would probably end up actually using it more than I would Accelerated Reader. I signed up for an account with Mindmeister and I'm excited to learn more about it. The reason I chose this technology is that I feel that one of the most important things I can teach my students that will help them in their learning is to not be afraid to share ideas and to talk about the texts that we read. Discussion is the best way to discover things about a text. I know that for myself, when other people's perspectives and ideas are brought into a text I am reading, it adds a whole new dimension to my understanding. And so I feel that discussion is absolutely essential to learning about literature. However, I understand that not all students are comfortable participating in class discussions and they might be afraid that their ideas are stupid or invalid. I have traditionally been one of the shyer students in my classes as well so I understand where they're coming from. This would be a great way for students to share ideas about a text without forcing them to do something that they may be very uncomfortable with. I want the sharing of ideas to be a positive experience and so I think that this technology might be incredibly useful in allowing students to share ideas in a less scary setting.

Photo Story 3

Maybe it's cheating a little bit to do my weekly participation blog on the tool I used for my instructional video, but I really liked this tool and I'm excited to use it in the future. My video is a little bit unexciting but that's because this was my first time using Photo Story for Windows. I really love this tool! What a great way to make videos of any kind using pictures. It is incredibly fast and easy and I think in the future in my classrooms, I will record something similar to a power point lecture using this tool so that students that miss class can view what we learned at home. I may also use this simply to create supplementary matieral for students to learn and study on their own and then come to class to dicuss what was discussed on the video. Having this information saved can also be helpful for students when reviewing for tests. Also, I think this is a great tool to teach students to use because it is so easy. And this way, they can create instructional videos for the class for say a book report or something like that so that the students can have a little bit of fun and use creativity as well as technology to do a report instead of just turning in written summaries or something like that.