I enjoyed this class. I continue to work on my assignments. I can honestly say that technology still frustrates me, but I am working hard to overcome this challenge. This class has opened my eyes to a lot of additional possibilities for my parents, students and myself. If only education allowed more time to create, design, research and implement just think what we could do in the classrooms. I truly appreciated the work time in this class. For example, the podcast took our group about 3 hours to complete the recording session alone. The availability of class time and support was appreciated.

December 17th Blog

I enjoyed having the entire class time to work on the various assignments that are due. My group got our podcast done. I was also able to fix a few minor parts on the blog and finish it as well. I also completed the school business software assessment. It was a real relief to get these assignments done.

During the last class meeting, I was a little frustrated with the audacity program because it was not working properly for us. We wasted quite some time trying to get it to work. As always, once we got it to work, it worked and we got the job done. That is the trouble with technology, sometimes you spend so much time just trying to get it to work. You spend more time trying to get it to work, than to do the actual assignment! It can be so frustrating. I was glad we had the time to work in class, though. We did get it done. It was fun. I think we three learned quite a bit about cyber bullying. It is an interesting subject. We also found that we had to cut our essay down quite a bit to make it under 7 minutes. I feel like we didn't do the subject justice, but it was pretty lengthy to start with.

Web Site

The site you sent us www.northpole.com was certainly a hit with my nephews. They explored it Christmas day. I didn't get a chance to use it with my classroom this year. However, it will certainly be on my list for "enrichment" in the classroom in 2009. Thanks again! Please, if you find any others similar to it, email me the site address.

Thanks Dr. Closen for a very informative, interesting, and challenging class! It was exciting to learn the possibilities for technology usage in our own classroom. This class required me try out these tools that I would have never known about or ventured to try out otherwise. I appreciated being able to work during class. Thanks to your help and my peers support, I feel I have learned a lot. Special thanks to Lisa who is always willing to to lend a hand when the need arises! I am very excited to use the blog and wiki when I return to the classroom. I already have made contacts to put these tools into action on a new project. I am a pleased technology novice thanks to this class and look forward to sharing what I've learned with my student teacher when she begins in Jan. Thanks, and Happy New Year to everyone!

I am having the hardest time remembering to blog promptly! My apologies!

I have been totally absorbed in my assignments, to the extent that I will not be done with all of my assignments before the first of the year. I am having a great time looking for resources for the multimedia project, and I'm learning some things by trial and error. I guess that is the way I learn best. I have learned a lot of new things in this class, and I'm 'getting by with a little help from my friends!'

Our class in February seems like a long way off, but I'm sure it will be here before I know it.
Happy Holidays, everyone!

Tom Nelson

Last Wednesday, I worked with a number of google gadgets to plug into blogs. One frustrating thing about them is their sizing. They come in defined sizes, and they sometimes don't fit on the design of the blog they're being inserted into. I am not sure how to tweak the settings to make them fit, but I will be looking into that. I also experimented later with partial success as copying and pasting the javascript code into other html files. This opens up a whole new domain for adding all kinds of glitzy bells and whistles to Moodle pages and others.
One complaint about the gadgets is the number of broken gadgets. With their vast billions, Google could hire somebody to delete the ones that don't work any more.
I will say here that this has been a useful survey of technology for the classroom. I realize that we have just touched the surface of many of these topics.
Overall, I think the internet is a great resource, and I think there is great potential for it in the classroom. The problem is finding the right stuff and weeding out the garbage, especially video. The blogger gadget assignment and the delicious presentation reminded me of this. Compard to years ago, Google's search engines have helped get internet users to just what they want, but I along with others are looking for the tool to take it to the next level. There's just too much junk to wade through. Teachers can't possible look at all this stuff. Maybe some of the things we looked at like delicious and stumbleon will lead to a solution. The next computer genius is someone who can develop a way to generate search tags for video content.