Digital Portfiolo Website

I have finally put the finishing touches on my very own website and I have now made it officially public. www.jamesedwards90.weebly.com is where you will find it at. I chose to make my site based around the idea of a Digital Portfolio. I feel this idea is very beneficial and will have much future use when graduating. Some of the main sectors that I have completed are about me, my philosophy, resume, teaching experience, and links to my blog and Symbaloo pages. Feel free to leave suggestions for my website on my blog if you have any. The site is a great start for my portfolio but feel it is important to keep adding more sections to it and make it as professional as possible. So while I am happy with my current site there is always room to improve and expand. Hopefully by the end of this course it will be nearly flawless.

Thanks for reading and remember to check out my webpage.

Making A Website

We visit many different websites people have created each and everyday to make connections. How hard is it to make a wesbsite of our own? Well we are going to find out. I have just today created the search domain for my very own first website on Weebly. A personal website can have many uses wether you want to use it for your classroom, personal interest or digital portfolio. I feel a class website could be a good place to present such information as course calendar, curriculum, expectations, and grades for students and their parents. These are just some starter ideas I have for my website. I look forward to trying to include some of these pages in my website in the next week and being able to share with you a finished product in the near future.

Thats all for now, thanks for reading.

Second Week

Hey folks welcome to my second blog. Today I am going to talk about a bookmarking tool which we learned about in our second week of class in Using ICT in education. The page is called Symbaloo. Symbaloo is a personal startup page which makes it easy to compile your favourite and most frequently visited sites all into one interface. I found this site very interesting not only as a potential classroom use but also for personal use as well. You are able to create different tabs and title them for what that page will be used for. One potential way I can see myself using this as a tool in the classroom are sharing websites with students and parents. Symbaloo can be especially useful in helping manage class time by quickly directing them to the proper site with one click of a button or setting up the options for sites they are aloud to play educational games on. Some other ways I can use this page as a teacher in the future are professional development, digital portfolios and curriculum outlines. If you haven't tried Symbaloo you should definitely take a look around as its one of the best book marking page setups I have seen to date. Well thats all for this blog catch you next week.

First Blog

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. This is my first ever blog and although I have never blogged myself I have read many and am happy to have the opportunity to share my thoughts in this class. I am very excited to get this semester going and get back out student teaching in March. In the first week of ICT for Educators we talked about what we'll be doing throughout this course, experimented with a few new programs, and created our own blogs. This seems like a very interesting course that will help a lot in expanding our technological resources for teaching in the future.


We learned and experimented with the program Wordle. We created our own word clouds using words about technology and education. The program gives greater imaging to words that appear more frequently in the text you write. You can edit you word clouds with different fonts, colours, and layouts. I can see this program being useful in the classroom as a potential ice breaker activity or word bank for a game.


We also also signed up for Ning for the Faculty of Education. Ning is a site that allows people to create their communities and social networks around users specific interests with their own design, features and member data. This site could be useful as a future teacher for having class discussions, posting questions, assignments, photos, video, etc. so it is available for your students online. I hope learn to more about Ning throughout the semester.


We also experimented with Padlet as a class and answered some questions on it. Padlet is almost like a bulletin board online where teachers can post questions in which students can all respond on their own. It allows people to post their topics on a common topic easily. I think this could be very useful in say a social studies class in which you use open ended questions and ask students to repsond. People can post videos, images, documents text. It would obviously be important to go over acceptable use of behaviour before using a site like this in your classroom.



Overall it was a very interesting first week and was good to experience some new programs which I have never used before. So hopefully I didn't bore you too much with my first blog, stay tuned for next week.