Mandy's reflection of Technology

GEMS:

I loved it! I never get time to sit and do this stuff! It was great to ask questions with each other as well as with the teacher. Time to talk also helped us come up with more ideas to use the technology. I feel more comfortable with the technology and trying it. It was much easier than I thought it was going to be and now feel that since I have them started, I can add to them and create more (blog and photostory). The website is a bit longer to navigate and more involved to create, but really feel like I have a good foundation to continue it. I will definitely be incorporating more technology, despite teaching on the cart. Twiiter is still a bit overwhelming, but at least now I know I can find information I can use on current events rather than just celebrity gossip (that's all I thought it was). Overall, this class took away the "I'm not sure and seems long and painful, so I won't start" out of the technology stuff. I will use a lot of what we created! Thanks!

OPS:

I felt lost starting out with everything. THe work time in class did help immensely, though. Maybe having some simple bare bones directions or steps to follow to get me started would have helped, especially with TWitter and the website. It was a bit frustrating not knowing the icons and their location, so editing certain areas took longer. On Twitter, I wasn't sure how to tweet simply because the icon was new to me and that I had to go to the teacher's site to post a tweet. The website was the trickiest because there were so many different screens that allowed different functions, so the cheat sheet would have been helpful. I always struggle with how to best use these things, so maybe a list we formed as a class of ways to use them in the future and sent in an email would be nice (although we got some ideas by viewing others stuff in class).