Twitter and Me

     So far it has been a very eye opening experience working with Twitter for class. Up until this point I had always had a dim view of Twitter and made sure to avoid making my own account. Now while I still see large amount of Twitter as useless, the educational uses shown to us is class have proved that it could be a very valuable tool in teaching. Twitter is a great way to collaborate with other professionals in a quick and straight forward atmosphere. It also could be extremely useful in class with the students. As we saw on Tuesday (Feb. 18), Twitter can be used to share answers in class between both teachers and students. Not only does this document all of the answers, but it gives the opportunity for participation from everyone. Although using it to take a quiz, as we did in class, sounded confusing at first it quickly became clear as to how it can be utilized. New to me was the TweetDeck, which provided a great way to organized the class's answers and the provided questions.

The Final Frontier

     For our assignment we were to create a presentation touching on the subject covered in the article "The Final Frontier" by Peggy A. Ertmer. In the article Ertmer goes over such topics as, the usefulness of technology in education, the belief systems currently held by a great deal of teachers, and what steps can be taken to change these beliefs with the final goal being full integration of technology in the classroom. She references statistics and the thoughts of other experts to enforce the idea of changing the current and future belief system so that seamless use of technology is possible. As part of our assignment we had to create the presentation entirely through the Google Drive. This allowed us to each work on one group presentation on separate computers in real time. This gave us great fluidity to the manipulate our presentation as a group. The final result being a clear, effective, and to the point presentation. In our presentation we reviewed some of the issues that prevent beliefs from being changed. We also included several slides that outline the perks of technology in the classroom. These slides contained a video supporting technology integration, facts found in the article, and links to other sources of support.To conclude, here is our final draft of the presentation.