Final Reflection Report

At the completion of this learning journey, I have a few favorite discoveries and exercises. Before taking this course, I was not as knowledgeable about Web 2.0 and the many different resources and tools that could be used in the classroom.
My favorite tool that I learned about is a blog. I knew that blogs exist especially through following my best friend's blog when she was in Australia, but I didn't look at it quite the same as a useful tool in the classroom. In my future classroom, I plan to have my own blog as the classroom teacher so that I can communicate with parents more effectively. I will have other ways of communicating with my parents, such as an agenda, written notes sent home, and e-mail, but I feel a blog could help everyone be up to date about what is going on in their child's classroom. A blog could also be useful for parents to ask questions and have other parents see the answers to those questions in case they may have the same question. A blog is a very useful tool for the classroom!
Through this journey I discovered a way to use a social networking site, facebook, as an educational tool in the classroom. Having a class mascot or class pet on facebook would unite classmates and allow them to use technology is an educational way.
Creating my own delicious website is one of the most useful tools I learned about through this course. Before learning about delicious.com, I would bookmark websites but not be able to access them other than on my own computer. My delicious website helps me not only access those sites from other computers but it also categorizes my websites so when I'm searching for a specific topic, I will be able to search my own sites that I have bookmarked.
The last tool that I especially learned from is how to create a webquest on wetpaint.com. The more familiar I am with that website, the more creative webquests I will be able to create. It is relatively easy and it helped to have my group members to help learn how to make a webquest.
Before taking this course, I would have only been familiar with the Smartboard. After taking this class, it has allowed me to become familiar with many different Web 2.0 tools I can use in my future classroom. When I have my own classroom I know I will be using many of these tools to make my teaching more effective and up t0 date.
This course didn't come with any take-aways or fallbacks. This is my first online class and I feel the amount of work I was asked to complete was fair and relevant. It helped to communicate with other classmates through our discussion board and see the ideas from a different point of view. Something that did surprise me was the amount of technology that is out there to be used in the classroom that I didn't know about.
The only thing I would recommend to change with this course is with the last module. There were some links that were hard to access because I needed an account to watch the videos. I have never had a problem until I tried to access some of the youtube videos on the "Introducing Other Web 2.0 Tools" module. The links I needed to sign up for an account for are "Online Photo Sharing in Plain English" and "Podcasting in Plain English." I had no trouble watching "Social Networking in Plain English" video. Other than that, all of the websites and links were very useful throughout the course. Like I mentioned before, the course work was relevant and useful.
If there was another course similar to this one I would most definitely choose to take the course. It was easy to follow, the professor was very helpful and available for any questions. The best benefit is not having to drive 45 minutes to campus and participate in a lecture style class. I was able to log online and complete the class at my own pace on my own time (within the project deadlines).