This past semester has been very rewarding for me. It was the first time that I was enrolled in two different graduate courses at one time, so I was nervous. I must admit that it was a real challenge at times, but I do feel a sense of fulfillment now that the term is over. I’m pleased with my performance and I’ve learned so much that will be very helpful to me in the future. I look forward to sharing in this post what I’ve learned, the new things I can now do, and how my thinking has changed about technology integration since the beginning of the term.
Besides being pleased that I successfully made it through the semester, I am happy that I was able to “resurrect” my job-related blog that I had only dabbled with before. Now I am actually posting to this blog on a regular basis, and I’m pleased that others are starting to connect to it. That feels great!
In addition, I now have experience working with a wiki which is one of the technologies I had always wanted to use before, but I’d never had the chance. I enjoyed using the wiki format for the basis of my digital storytelling project. As I completed this project, I also learned about the key elements of a digital story and I believe I could now work with students to successfully complete such a project.
As I worked through the modules of EME5050, I found a lot of very useful educational web sites. I used my existing Delicious account to collect all of the URLs. I’m also looking forward to working more with Diigo which was the new social bookmarking web site I learned about during this semester. It has some features that Delicious just doesn’t.
There was another technology that was new to me during this course, and I actually avoided learning how to use it at first. Prezi is the name of the program and I ended up falling in love with it once I took the time to view the tutorials and learned how it works. At the time it was presented to us, we also learned about another program called SlideShare. For the particular assignment we were given to complete, I chose to use PowerPoint, my “old standby,” in combination with SlideShare. It was easy to do, but I wasn’t really satisfied and wanted to learn how to use Prezi. It took determination and persistence, but I did finally become comfortable using the program and it became a central part of my digital storytelling project for EME5050. This is another “moral victory” for me at the end of this term, and I can see myself using this program in the future. I believe Prezi will be a great alternative to PowerPoint for students to learn to use for presentations.
Another technology that I’ve started using on a regular basis as a result of being a student in this course is Twitter. I started using it a couple of years ago when I took my first trip to New York City. I tried using it to keep my family and friends up-to-date on what I was doing. That was only for a brief period of time, and I appreciate the opportunity to start using it again. One new technology that I learned about during EME5050 was HootCourse and I’m going to look into how to utilize it with the next online professional development training that I will be facilitating.
I learned so much this semester, and I envision myself using many of the new technologies in my job as a trainer and technology integration specialist. Luckily, many of these are free Web 2.0 tools and most of them are not actually blocked in my school district.
