My Educational Technology journal

So I am coming close to finishing my course. I submitted my Professional Growth Plan and this past weekend finished participating in a second online dialogue. I still need to work on my webpage and make sure it is all polished before submitting it. When I recently looked at the webpage the other day I was amazed at how simple it looked to me, but how impressed my girlfriend was at how it looked. I really enjoyed working with Google Sites because it was easy to set up a web page. While we all had to use it, I think this is a great tool to use (like the other artifacts submitted) and I can see myself having students create a webpage for courses and then throughout the year the need to add onto it. This can be something that is a really good example of the formative/summative assignment. Throughout the year they have a bunch of small assignments and can always go back and work on it after being given feedback, then at a specific day, you have let them know the website is going to be m...

Writing this on the 14th, I got my feedback on my Curriculum report and was quite happy with the feedback. As I work on finishing up my masters, I find I look and read more about the specific feedback more than the mark. While the mark is important and gives context, when I get genuine feedback it helps me understand whether the goals I had for the assignment were clear to the reader. Some other courses I have taken have given either minimal feedback, or what seems like a standardized cut and paste feedback. Currently, I am participating in a discussion on technology to assist in writing. While the other participants are looking at the issue with younger students, I am coming at it after working with older students. I find it interesting that regardless of age, we are all looking to technology for an answer. I have been talking about Grammarly in that post, and I have used Grammarly and talked about Grammarly in so many courses now and to so many teachers/students. I'm sure we al...

I sat down last Saturday with a full day ahead of me to start working on the Curriculum Integration Report, thinking that after having done most of the research and putting together resources throughout Module 1 it would not take longer than a day or two. Well, I now realize I was dead wrong as it is Wednesday and I am sitting down for another session on working through it. I find that the more I work on it the more things I find I could add to it. I am hoping to have it finished today. The first thing I realized when I thought I had finished was I had not actually added anything about changing the curriculum. I had identified the issues and talked about how/why the internet has affected research and looked at potential ways teachers could fix the problem. By reading through the assignment outline and really thinking about the title of the assignment I realized I had missed a large section. So I had to rework how the presentation was put together and ensure that throughout it I was...

I am taking a brief pause from putting together my resource depot and the rationale for what it is and why it is. I find that just as I have been playing around putting the different embedded features, headings, texts that I am able to work around with the format a lot better than at the beginning of the course. I initially was caught up in having everything I wanted together in the same section, but now I realize that I can link the different sections together by putting the same background together. I think the simplicity of Google Sites is helping by limiting the choices of the design I want. In terms of selecting my resources, I have found that there really is so much content on the internet that simply putting together some of them in one place will (hopefully) prove useful. In the future, when I assign students a research-based assignment, I will try to create a resource depot for them on what are good websites to search or how to do search properly.

So I now have all three of my artifacts up and going and can be found at  https://sites.google.com/view/mrbergseducationalportal/welcome-to-educ5203 . One problem I encountered was that I had not set my videos to be public on the web through my Google Drive. I had checked to see if the videos worked but realized thanks to my prof. that I could see them because I was signed into my Google Drive account but no one else would be able to. I think this is a great example/learning point that for every three things I learn, I may end up overlooking one. With technology, it is hard to know everything and this will continue to be a learning process. One of the things I have found with this course is the need to take time to invest and play around with the different technologies. Other courses of a more traditional read and write variety, I know what I am doing. I have to read new information, gather sources, edit and write. While it also takes time, I know how to do it. With this course...

After thinking about this for a while I finally got around to uploading my first and second artifacts. My first one was about Screencastify, which I linked in my last post, and was fairly straightforward to record. For my second artifact, Pear Deck, I again had to use Screencastify to shoot a video of me explaining all the aspects of the technology. This one took a little longer to shoot because my internet was being slow and I felt that there are more features I wanted to highlight. Artifact 1:  https://sites.google.com/view/mrbergseducationalportal/welcome-to-educ5203/screencastify-artifact-1 Artifact 2:  https://sites.google.com/view/mrbergseducationalportal/welcome-to-educ5203/pear-deck-artifact-2 It is nice to get these two complete. I find that the more I work on my website and the more I learn, the more I realize how much potential there is with this. I feel that this website will be something I can add to over the years and really work to make a great resource for...

I am currently working on three courses for my masters while teaching 28 hours at an ESl acadamey. At the same time, I have been working to secure a teaching placement for next year, which has led to me writing and sending about 40-50 cover letters and emails. All this to say that I found myself busier than I had initially planned. I have been using several online apps I learned because of this course in my teaching and in some of my other courses. As of yet I have not had time to put together my specific artifacts but I feel I have already learned how to use them. So just to link them here, I plan on using Pear Deck, Screencastify, and Google forms to show which skills/technology I have learned. https://www.peardeck.com/ https://www.screencastify.com/ I have also been looking at doing something with Make Belief Comic or Padlet https://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/ https://padlet.com/dashboard

Well, I have just finished Module 1 assignment 3a to conduct a professional dialoguge. I personally enjoyed being able to choose the topic, post questions and get feedback from my peers. However, I found I had a hard time keeping up with the replies because of the time difference. I am currently living in Spain so I am 5/6 hours ahead. So I would try to post the questions for each day ahead of time but then when classmates responded I didn't always have time to respond right away. A second thing I was not sure how to deal with was what I felt were dismissals of the questions or disagreement between me and a classmate. If it were a normal face-to-face class their could be some social capital that would have been built up during the course which would allow for some disagreement and conversation. However, in this online format, and as a facilitator, I found it hard to respond to classmates if I thought they did not fully give the question an answer or stated an opinion I disagreed ...