Week 9: Thing 23 - AKA The End!

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I liked learning more about RSS feeds and Image generators.

2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I want to revisit how and when I use technology. I know there are a lot of times I think about it, but don't actually do it. I need to be more proactive in including technology and making it a part of what I do rather than something on top of what I already do with my students.

3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
Really, my own exploring of new tools (Google Wave, Google Moderator, and sites.google.com) was what benefitted me the most. I looked at the instruction from this program and thought "surely there's a better way or a way that applies more to my classroom". This really got me thinking about practical tools that cater to my needs in my classroom.

4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
Rather than finding "cool tools" like the flickr stuff, find practical tools like online polling software, advance methods for actually designing effective wikis and blogs, and useful research based search engines would be much more helpful than "fun" or "cool" activities. They need to remove things like "Youtube" which we all use and have become a part of our lives and continually replace the "things" with emerging technology (i.e. Google Wave).

5. If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate? If so, check out Discovering Assistive Technology.
I would if it was more geared to applicability to actual classroom activities to help us with work we're already doing. I don't need my kids to search for flickr pictures when they could be using the internet to help develop more useful and academic tools.

6. How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote Classroom Learning 2.0 learning activities?
Technology is always advancing, and we just have to find the right tool at the right time to help us with our current task realizing there will be a better, more accurate, more helpful tool soon to emerge if we only take the time to look for it and apply it.

Done!