I am still struggling keeping up with all of these new, wonderful tools that keep getting thrown at us. I think RSS feeds, Social Bookmarking, and Twitter are great and I can see the use for them, but I can't seem to find the time in the day to really use them to their full potential.
I am excited to start using social bookmarking. I have heard about it throughout the courses, but have yet to actually really use it. I have set up a diigo account and have just barely started using it at school and home. I think it has a lot of wonderful features. I would like to use it with my students when they are doing their research projects. I think it would be a great way for them to keep track of useful sites they find as well as put notes in as to what they found in each site. I am not sure if I will use it with them this year, but would like to have it in place for next year.
I am also excited to do a podcast. Again, podcasting is something I learned about a few years ago. I even went out and bought Podcasting for Dummies, but I never created one. I can see using podcasts with my class a lot. I would like to have them make their own and post them to our blog. Hopefully, this is something we can do this year. There are so many cool things out there to use in the classroom the problem is making sure you find effective ways to add them to your curriculum without taking away from the things you have to teach! I love using technology with the things we are already doing, but because most of the technologies are new to the students it ends up taking us way longer to accomplish the task.
I completely understand the struggle with keeping up with all these new tools. It seems like new stuff comes out before I can conquer the old. The way that I manage it is by trying to focus on one thing at a time and if it does not seem to have any clear benefits I just move on to the next thing. It seems a bit unpractical to use them all but it is nice to see what is out there.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the necessity of making sure we are using the right tools for the job. Although technology is fun, we also need to make sure we are not just using it for the sake of saying we have added technology to our curriculum. There are so many fabulous tools out there that can really enhance and impact our lessons. It is a lot harder to add technology in your classes since much of it will be new to your students. (although as a middle school teacher, the more they get in the elementary school, the easier my job is) I suppose the question is, does the technology really impact the learning?
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