ed class

I hate I missed the presentation on Twitter but after reviewing it and reading about it a bit I am not so sure what I think. It reminds me of status’s on facebook. Does that correspond with what others think?

I think it works well as what it does but I find it a bit pointless. I do not want people to know what I am doing every second or what book I just finished reading. I understand it is good for people who live far apart maybe, but I still think a personal e-mail would be a nicer way to go about sharing things.

I do not think I would use twitter and I think people need to spend less time in front of the computer–but hey I guess it is everyones own decision to make.

What do you think? Does anyone use Twitter regularly?

Today we learned about whiteboards and podcasting-

I have used whiteboards back home and LOVE them. I actually worked at a charter school for technology and saw them used in so many ways, with second graders! One thing that stood out while I worked there was that we had someone from the local aquairium come and bring different animals, the whiteboard can come with a microscope device and they used it to enlarge the animal and have it on the board-it was so great you could see the creature breathing!- The presentation was very good and I liked how we got to play with the whiteboard application outself!

The other presentation was on podcasting. I have never used podcasting or really heard of it except on One Tree Hill and commercials about having it on your telephone. I thought it was cool we could use the garage recording device and the presentation video’s were interesting–I would like to take more time and explore podcasting myself.

So I found some bad news out the other day that I am failing a class over here in Australia. I find it upseting considering that I have never made below a B in my life and I have not had a difficult time in any class thus far in my university experience. As far as I know I am doing well in the rest of my classes, and I thought I was doing just fine in the class I am failing too. I found out the bad news on Tuesday and stayed after class (I have not missed a class the whole year) to talk with the teacher. However, she was not much help and didn’t seem to think much of my problem. I have a huge assignment due in a week for her class that counts as 50% of my grade, and after recieving a failing grade for my last assignment I figured she would understand my delima. Instead she told me she had somewhere she had to be and good luck with my research. Now as a future teacher I was not only upset by the way she handled the situation but very angry that she honestly did not care about her students. I cannot affor to fail a class seeing that I am an exchange student and grades are very important to get transfer credit and graduate on time.

But what do you think? Should she have helped me more or should I have realized that things in another country are different and I shouldn’t worry with it? How else could I get help for my next assignment?

Last Thursday Lauren and I had our presentation of google docs. Now I wish I had used this blog to see if anyone had any key imput on google docs before I had my presentation but maybe next time. The presentation went very well from what I could tell and I was actually really glad there were bumps along the way because it went along to prove that google docs has a lot of kinks it needs to work out. I like the idea of google docs as i said in my presentation but they were a pain to work with and I would not use them again.

has anyone else used them or have any thoughts about them?

Last Thursday we learned about facebook and myspace, I have never used myspace but thought of myself as pretty well informed as far as facebook goes. I had never thought of either of these tools being anyway connected with education until i heard the presentation. I guess there is always the fact of privacy and the dangers that come along with it but they are still great networking tools. I do think you have to read through the fine print of “terms and conditions” or at least read it because it talks a good bit about privacy and how once you post something it is the websites material. I guess this goes with any website but it is always dangerous to expose kids to these things.

I know people who have been fired from jobs because of their facebook pictures (granite I am from America) but I strongly belivee it is important to monitor what is posted on these sites. I do overall think they are great websites though and I use them regularly. Actually when I came over from America I used facebook to meet people and get an idea of what the weather would be like, what people do on the weekends, etc. It was good to have a little knowledge coming into this experience and since people are connected by networks, I typed in the name of the university and got a whole list of people in the network!

what do you think? any preference of facebook vs. myspace?

so today I had an epiphany, I have previously thought of blogs as talking back and forth between two people, so if someone hadn’t posted on my blog, I therefore didn’t have a response, hence why I havn’t hardly written on here since I started it. But today I realized I can use the blog to write about my feelings, my day, how class is going etc. I have no idea how I missed that whole concept until now half way through the semester but it’s never too late.

So I have read through a good many of the blogs of people in my classroom and they are all pretty similar and a lot of people seem to be getting into the whole idea of bloging which makes me excited to get started. I don’t have any big news of sad story to publish that will enspire readers but I do look forward to being more active on here!