Overall Course Reflection

IT740 has certainly been a very interesting and engaging class and there are many tools that I will incorporate into my educational courses, both face-to-face and online. Even though I teach high school and community college students, there are tools that will apply to both situations. Tools like Layar, VoiceThread, Screenr and Glogster can be very beneficial for both Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design because of the built-in creativity factor as well as the engaging approach used by these tools. Personal Finance students will benefit from YouTube, GoAnimate, and Screenr because of the opportunity to present their ideas and work in a unique way. There are other tools that can benefit all of the students, such as ThingLink, Scoop.it, Wordle, and many others that may be found at http://www.go2web20.net/. This website lists hundreds of tools that can be used for myriad applications in many fields. The possibilities are really endless, and the ability to present class materials in many different formats will help me reach the many different learning styles that are involved and should keep students more interested in learning. 

My favorite assignment in the class was the presentation of a Web 2.0 tool to the class. This allowed for every student to choose a favorite tool, research the tool, learn how to use the tool, create a presentation, and then deliver the presentation to the class as well as teach the class how to use the tool. This gave each of us an opportunity to share our knowledge with our community of learners, and it made the learning much more interesting and engaging. The challenge was finding my favorite tool because there were so many beneficial ones available. Once I chose the tool, however, it was easy to learn the tool and share it with the class. It was also fairly easy to see the correlation between using these tools as an instructor and how they might be used by the students. I totally agree with Dr. Yuen about how professional development has been centered around training teachers how to use tools, but not really showing them how those tools can be interfaced with curriculum and learning so students will be more engaged. Additionally, we are tasked with the duty to train teachers how to provide the tools to the students so they can use them to complete assignments, and how the results can be assessed. Perhaps if teachers are armed with this knowledge, they will make better use of the tools that are now ubiquitous.

While in this class, we used a site call mixxt, which served as the web host for our class instructor, the syllabus, course information, class assignments and postings, course schedule, discussions, lecture notes, videos and images. It is a fairly simple site that is easy to navigate and offers an avenue for collaboration and a community of learning. It is a "member only" site so it does make it somewhat private, which I prefer. It also offers a blog where classmates can post things of interest to the class, and there is even a place for online chat. This is definitely an option that I would consider using as an instructor.