ICT in Education Course Overview

I thoroughly enjoyed this class and the instruction from it.  Mike was a fantastic instructor who got us all involved and allowed us to have fun while learning, which it what it's all about.  I learned tons about educational internet sites, making a website, apps on the internet, apps for apple and android, blogging and using smart-boards just to name some of the neat stuff most of us didn't know about headed in.

In regards to myself moving forward I plan on using technology in my future lessons.  This course showed me so much that is out on the web that I have not heard of whatsoever.  I can't describe all the cool stuff I learned in one post but i'll go through some highlights.  I really enjoyed using weebly the website creator.  It was so easy to use and I had never made a website before so that was extremely beneficial.  I made both an eportfolio and potential classroom webpage off of weebly.  The eportfolio is going to be great when looking for jobs going forward.  I just hope more principals look at them.  I also hope to use a classroom webpage if I do indeed get that full time teaching job.  The final project we did I also had a good time doing.  My group conducted a podcast.  I enjoy listening to different sports podcasts but never have had made one.  It was pretty general and was focussed on making podcasts and what they could be useful for.  We used audacity to record our presentation.  We had to battle through a bit of a learning curve but produced a pretty solid 13 minute podcast.  Going forward I would like to figure out that program a bit more or use apple's garageband since I own a macbook.  There were also some presentation websites we used like prezi and haiku-deck which are like online power points.  We learned about different apps not only from Mike but other students final group presentations.  I learned about this app called team shake which splits up teams by entering names and shaking the device.  I want to be a physical education teacher so this along with some other useful apps with be useful.  Finally I learned about phonto and keynote which I downloaded and have played around with.  Phonto is for adding caption to pictures where keynote is a useful app for recording notes by voice, type or picture.  It can be helpful in class and to do day to day tasks.

There is one big section we talked about that I want to know well that I didn't get much of a chance to use first hand.  Smartboards are extremely helpful in today's classroom and can help keep students motivated.  One of the groups presented some general activities you can do to help kids learn on the smartboard and I was intrigued.  I plan to take some professional development to better my knowledge and learn some new techniques regarding smartboards.  They are cool and in many of today's classrooms.