Week 11-Video

I thought the video was funny but he also had a lot of good points too. I've had a lot of teachers who have done just what this guy says not to do in a powerpoint. I think it's important to at least be aware of the things not to do. If you've never been told you might not think about it. You might think that the more information or the more colors you use in your powerpoint the better it will be, but that is not always true. You have to realize how it looks to the audience viewing it.

Week 11-Picasa and Powerpoints

I think that powerpoint's will be a really helpful tool to use in the classroom. It's an easy way to use visuals in your presentation. You can post pictures that go along with the presentation and also links to videos you might want to show. They're really easy to make. The google presentations would especially be helpful if you were collaborating with collegues to make a presentation. Powerpoints could be used to teach almost any kind of lessons and you could also use them for presentations to collegues or parents. Picasa is a very easy and helpful way to edit photos. This would be really helpful to cut or manipulate images to make them more useful in your powerpoint or to use in the classroom.

Week 9-Video

I thought that the edited David Letterman top 10 thing was kind of lame. But there is truth to some of the things they said. Things that you wouldn't really think about when you're going into teaching. It's important to realize those things too.

I thought that the Mashups were really cool. They would be really hard to make but it would be fun to use them in the classroom just to provide some variety for the students.

Week 9-Digital Camera's

Digital Camera's are a really good tool to use in the classroom. You could take pictures of all the students to help learn there names at the beginning of the school year. You could use the students picture to make a poster for the student of the week. Also, you could take pictures of anything you wanted to teach about in the classroom and print them off or use them in power point presentations. I think that using a digital camera would be a very helpful way to provide visuals to your students to help them learn. Some of the pros to digital cameras are that you can edit the picture on your computer so you only use the parts of the picture or emphasize the parts of the picture that apply to what you're teaching.

Week 8-Video

I think it's important to use upbeat things like this video to teach. Subjects like history can be boring for kids and by using songs it gets them interested. I think this video is a good way to reinforce what you've been teaching in class or to introduce something that you might be talking about. It's good to introduce kids to famous people and events and this video is one way to show them a lot of events at once. Then when you teach them about it, they've heard of it so they have some kind of background knowledge or an image to draw from. I know that when I've never heard of something before it's harder for me to learn about it but when I've at least heard of it or seen it then it makes it easier to learn about and I'm more interested.

Week 8-Internet Safety

I think it's important to understand the dangers of the internet and ways to keep safe. As a teacher I will especially use these techniques to make sure that I keep my students safe from the things they might find on the internet. The more you understand and learn about internet safety the more you'll know what kinds of things to watch out for online. Parents will feel better if they know that their child's teacher is aware of the dangers of the internet and ways to keep their child safe. I could use what I know to help educate parents as well so that they know how to keep their kids safe at home too.
Also with understanding web safety I can help my colleagues to keep their classrooms safe as well and give them tips to find reliable information to use in their classrooms. By knowing how to evaluate websites I'll be able to provide students with the most accurate information and not just things that are passed on as true.

Week 7-Video

I think that it is so cool that they can do stuff like that now days. It seems so futuristic. As technology continues to develop we, as teachers, need to stay caught up on what is going on. The students coming through our classrooms will be exposed to so much more technology than we were at that age. As technology continues to improve, we will be lost if we don't keep up and we will not know how to teach our own students, who will know so much more than we do.

Week 7-UEN

I thought that they were really confusing to figure out how to use them, but I think once I'm comfortable with it UEN will be a good resource for teaching. There is a lot of information on the website and a lot of things that I could use to teach my students. The interactive's would be really good to help students learn while having fun. Pioneer Library would be really helpful to find information to teach to the students and also to have students use the articles, etc. to do reports.
The only con to UEN would be knowing how to find all that the website has to offer and getting used to using it.