It's the middle of September and things seem to really be in full swing centered around the school year. Coaching high school soccer has its daily time-consuming demands (but I love it!), Ashland courses have their weekly demands, a Math class at Ohio Dominican requires my attention from time to time, and occasionally I get to substitute teach when a teacher in the 12 districts I'm enrolled in decides to play hookie.
Oh...and let's not forget about football fever on the weekends...although I'm currently too busy to really care about football. I'd rather be out cycling. In fact, the middle of a home OSU game is the best time to be out on the road...the streets are free and clear of everything scarlet, grey, and intoxicated. Strongly recommended!
As luck would have it, I'm currently working on fulfilling one of my Ashland obligations...the weekly "Get it Done by Midnight" routine that I seem to entertain every Thursday night. I don't mind this week's duties one bit...starting my own blog is something I have always thought about but never had the impetus to really start. Maybe that's because I feel an audience is necessary to maintain a blog...otherwise, it's just a journal...which is another thing I've thought about doing but haven't followed through with. It's kind of fun sharing all the random thoughts that circulate in my head with ALL of you...even if "ALL of you" amounts to just my teacher.
It's been great working with a different technology tool each week for this class. As I have discovered already, there are going to be some tools that I feel have some great features, capture my imagination, are engaging, and appear to be wonderful educational tools that I hope to utilize in my classroom...while other tools just aren't going to be for me...and what I realize is that is perfectly fine. There are so many technological resources out there to incorporate into a teaching curriculum...it's not possible to use every medium and some simply aren't tailored to particular content areas.
I will eventually be spending my days in high school math classrooms. The web portal Protopage concept is wonderful for high school students to access information pertaining to their math class, view embedded videos, be provided with numerous links to further their understanding in a particular area, and provide them with lessons to complete online. The concept of dividing the content up into various tabs is a great organizational feature. I definitely plan on using this tool to create a class webpage. On the other hand, I did not have as much praise for the Glogster application. I can see its benefit, especially in lower grade levels where facts are the focus, but in upper level grades where concepts and processes are the focus, this tool falls a little short. Protopage, in my opinion, is multiple Glogster posters compiled into one central depository, exhausting half the effort.
And now I have a blog.
If I get more than one follower, I might just have to provide a link to this on my Protopage!
