Peggy's+Page+2

Application of the Tools
As a special education teacher, I always feel that my job is to find alternative ways to reach students. That was one of the reasons (besides being a technology geek) that I was interested in taking this class. I was not disappointed!

I always wanted to have a personal blog, and now I have one! Hurrah! When the class is over, I will continue to use the personal blog to jot down my thoughts about things in a place where I can reflect about my learning .. and a place where I can look back and say, "Why did I ever think that??" Along the way, I also developed a class blog for my remedial class. I used this blog to supplement the blog that the students were using for their language arts class to get them used to blogging. I can see that students really enjoy blogging, especially some of the students in special education.

The next new technology (new to me) was bookmarking. I thought it before but now I realize that I am a bookmark junkie! I bookmark everything and anything. It was so nice to have my bookmarks in one place because I was always trying to remember what I bookmarked at home and what I bookmarked at school. I'm dismayed that there was a tool for all those bookmarks that I left behind at Littleton High School two years ago! :) I really would like to teach students how to use delicious.com.

I really used the next tool .. audacity. I used the tool to make my wiki contribution. I said the Pledge of Allegiance and set it to music. I also shared the knowledge with others in our building. One of our foreign language teachers got excited because now she finally had a tool to use with reluctant writers .. after hearing about this tool and how simple it was to use, she knew that she could use this tool to reach a student in another way to demostrate learning. For our language arts unit on Memoir, I recorded my husband reading the first email that he sent home when we adopted our daughter. On the personal side, I was able to record my daughter singing "Our God" .. a religious tune that she learned .. to the music. She also sent a "letter" to another little girl who was struggling with adoption .. my daughter and this little girl were adopted at the same time.

Although RSS stream is a great tool, it's not something that I have been using since creating it. I still like to go to the Rocky in the morning (and check the basketball news). I guess I would need to get used to this tool. I'm not sure how I would use it in the classroom.

Google Earth was a lot of fun to use. I can definitely see using it in the future. I enjoyed making the tour of Harper Lee's life matched up to To Kill a Mockingbird.

I think that Wikis are really great tools. At first, I was not so sure. As I have started to use the Wiki, however, I am seeing how valuable it can be. I could envision each student having a wiki where the student could store all his/her assignments. Imagine how cool it would be for that student to be able to look back on each assignment in one place. I'm wondering if it would be less or more work. Of course, you would need to have daily access to a laptop .. maybe that is another topic that could be added to the class .. how to get grant money. Krista and I talked about that today .. that will be our continuing projedt!

I have already printed out the pages and pages of online tools that classmates have posted. I cannot wait to try some of them. I settled on three of my own for the wiki, but I also came across others that I would like to use. I am very interested in helping students manage their classwork .. and hope to find a great online tool that some students might like to use.

I want to end this page now with a quote from Randy Pausch: The best gift an educator can give is to get someone to become self reflective! Thank you, Randy and Dana!