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.