Evaluation

1. My favorite tools that I discovered were Flickr and Image Generator. I really liked being able to explore Flickr and look at everyones pictures. I'm a sucker for good photography, so I could have easily spent hours looking at pictures on that website. Although I probably would only use it for personal reasons, it was still fun to explore. I also liked the Image Generator as I think it would be a great way to come up with an image that has an overview of the next topic or major ideas that you are studying. I had originally explored Tagxedo, which I definitely want to incorporate more into my classroom.

2. This experience definitely made me realize that there are so many tools out there that I should be utilizing more in my classroom. Part of my learning contract was that I wanted to not only utilize, but also organize my toolbox more. After this experience I feel like there are so many more tools that I need to add to my toolbox and figure out how to incorporate in my daily lessons. I think that over time I will also be more confident using these tools in my classroom as I have been able to play with them through these activities. This really allowed me to have some time just to explore these different tools without having to worry about generating something for an upcoming lesson, which made it less stressful!

3. I think I actually liked more tools than I thought I was going to. Just from the headings of each thing, some of them seemed daunting and boring, but I actually enjoyed a lot of the tools that we were supposed to discover and explore. Although so many of them were great, I am going to have to spend some time now and really figure out which ones would be most beneficial to my students and their success.

4. Overall I think that this program was beneficial and the different things that we had to do were outlined in a concise, easy to understand manner. If anything, I might stretch the blog out over a longer period so that you are not doing as many things each week. Most of us are teaching full-time as well as taking one other grad school class, so some times it was hard to find time to complete so many activities within each week. Other than that, I enjoyed the blog project!