The 6th blog arrives!

A paragraph discussing your thoughts about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in K-12 education. Would you use them? Why or why not? How? Use online resources.

Web 2.0 technologies have many varied pros and cons. I myself find the using of Web 2.0 technologies as something easy and highly applicable in my college courses. However, I feel that this is only true because of my age and maturity level. Kids in middle school and even high school tend to be overzealous when it comes to Web 2.0 technology such as social networking sites. While these are great mediums to connect college alumni and current college students to their universities, younger students might have problems focusing on the subject matter and get carried away in the 'social' aspects. I personally think that photo sharing, video sharing, wikis and blogs would actually be very fun for students to use in classrooms. These mediums do afford students the chance to be creative with projects and learning and that is always a plus in my book.

A paragraph discussing your thoughts on Wikipedia as a learning resource.

Wikipedia is a veritable omniscient technology guru. Any question I ask or subject I may want to know about is on there. It is fast and easy to navigate, BUT IT SHOULD NEVER BE USED AS A RESOURCE FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN GIVING LEADS TO OTHER CREDIBLE SOURCES! Wikipedia is written by people and as such many of the articles are either poorly worded, not verified, and not even cited. This means that any information pulled off of wikipedia could be WRONG or even STOLEN information. It should only be used as a stepping stone and idea builder.

A paragraph on new skills you acquired in the last week that you think will be especially useful to you in your educational career and why you think so.

Last week I learned how to really do powerpoint. Don't laugh but I have never really done powerpoint all that well and so it was valuable for me to learn how to really get into the program. This will be useful for me as a teacher because I can use the powerpoint skills I've acquired to really capture and keep my student's interest.