Reflection on Collaboration Web Tools in Education-EEND-676Z3

December 1st, 2017

     I would like to reflect on my journey into my second technology course here at University of St. Francis in Joliet. I really liked the discussions because that is where you get great ideas! Sometimes people think of the simplest thing and you wonder why you didn't think of that. I am referring to an idea of how to use video conferencing someone brought up in the discussions. She said she was going to have the upper grade students use videos to read to the little kids. I thought that was a great idea!
      I thought this course helped me to get more comfortable blogging. It is the only way to blog. You have to use it and you have to use it regularly. I never thought about having students blog until this course. I am thinking of having students blog about the books that they reading. This would help students in the school to check out books from the library more. I really enjoyed looking at my classmates blogs and reading them. I need to make time to look at peoples blog because you can get great ideas from them too. In addition to Facebook and pinterest, blogs are now on my list!
      I now feel more comfortable introducing google tools to students and to show them how to use these tools to collaborate with one another on class projects. I am going to use the collaboration assignment I created with my students. I created a country assignment where students will collaborate on research using google keep, google docs, google drawings and google slides. I cannot wait to utilize it and see the results!
      In our week 3 assignment, we had to pick three Google tools and how we would use them in the classroom. I picked Google Keep, Google Slides and Google Drawings. What was neat about this was everyone had to put their thoughts into a google doc. So I saved it so I can learn to utilize the other google applications my colleagues recommended!
    We also learned about good writing prompts. I admit this was hard. You can come up with any question but coming up with a good engaging question was hard. I liked our instructor's idea about inventors !! I might have to steal that idea:) However, I like my writing prompt and will definitely use it this school year. It will be for my middle school students. They will be in groups and they will have to use padlet to discuss one piece of technology they could not live with out. They also have to visit at least two of their classmates padlets and comment positively on theirs. Creating a rubric on their collaboration project was hard because you want to be fair and make sure you give credit where it is due so I am glad this course made me think about how to create fair collaboration rubrics and I will use the one I created!
I am So Excited to use all the tools I learned in this class this school year!! Looking forward to my third class in the spring at the University of St. Francis in Joliet!