Week 9: Reflection

After nine weeks, I am certainly eager to apply what I have learned into my practice. I find myself referring to "this great class that I took this summer" frequently when catching up with my colleagues. My colleagues have been inundated with emails from me as I forward resources that I am receiving from my professional learning network.

In my last few posts I mentioned that I thought I was pretty tech-savvy before entering this course. I have been humbled by this course because I am amazed daily at what is out there that I not only never had tried, but never even heard of. Social bookmarking? Diigo? This resource alone was worth the tuition rate. Well, maybe I exaggerate, but I really like it a whole bunch!

In terms of what I wanted to know, I guess I cannot emphasize enough that I did not know what
I was missing. I wanted to improve teaching and learning in my classroom as the name of the class implies. Now that I reflect on Web 2.0 versus Web 1.0, I can distinctly discern the difference. I am not sure how much I "got it" before, but I get it now.

Upon completion of this course, I feel the biggest lesson I learned is that there are so many people out there willing to help and share information with you on countless topics. Expanding my professional learning network has helped to keep me "in the loop" with all of the newfangled technological developments that have educational importance in the teaching and learning that takes place in my classroom.

In closing, I would like to describe an example of the advantages of expanding my professional learning network. I was having difficulty with the appearance of projected images from my laptop while using my SMARTboard today, so I posted the following in a forum in the Ning group Smartboard Revolution. In less than one hour, had the response pictured. Amazing! Thanks Obe!

Hello. I was using my SMARTboard on my desktop pc today and everything worked fine. I then attached my laptop, switched to project from my laptop, and went to write on the board. When I did, the alignment was off so I tried to reorientate. When I did, only about 2/3 of the board was visible. What I mean is my last set of dots was not visible on the projected image. I switched back to the desktop and it was fine. I assume it is a projection setting issue from my laptop. Should I be projecting a certain resolution? Thanks, Mark