My Semester in IT 365.

All in all, this has been a wonderful semester in IT 365.  I, honestly, did not know what to expect coming into this course.  I knew it had to do with technology and computers, that like our IT class mandatory before this one.  I had no idea, however, that I would take so much away from this class.  There were tons of new programs I learned how to access and use, programs I had no idea even existed, right at my fingertips this entire time.  Starting from the beginning, one of our first assignments was creating and using a concept map through Kidspiration; I have, in a previous blog, reflected on this, but I will definitely be downloading the Kidspiration software on my home computer for future use.  Once we got into the Web Tools, things really became at my fingertips; this was a fun assignment to learn about Quizlet and EclipseCrossword.  Making a movie was a blast and learning about free Google Groups was even more fun.  Once again, the website I found to be a little bit more agonizing, but I know it will come in handy in the future because I will need something for my students' parents to look at for contact purposes, as well as keeping up with what is going from a day-to-day basis.  I can honestly say that my weaker points were definitely the website, but everything else in this course I did pretty well on and it came easy to me.  I cannot wait to integrate technology into my future teaching and I will probably do it almost every single day.  Technology is not something teachers can avoid anymore; it is a must.  In order to improve my weak areas, constantly tweaking the website that I have already created in class would be necessary.  I only have a year left before I actually start teaching, so learning these things now--at this point in my career--is pertinent.  Back to integrating technology into my future classroom, there are TONS of ways to do this, as I have learned in IT 365.  Students, these days, have cell phones as young as elementary grades and right there is one way to integrate it into lessons; if a student needs to research on the internet, that is the perfect to do so without causing commotion.  I know that I will be using all  of the programs and tricks that I have learned in IT 365 throughout the rest of my career and I feel blessed to have the opportunity to learn it and pass it on.

Assistive Technology.

My last and final project of this IT 365 course was an assistive technology assignment.  In this assignment, I had to explore the internet help options and figure out ways to accommodate certain things on web pages.  The reasoning behind all of this is to make things easier for people that have disabilities of sorts, such as visual disabilities, hearing disabilities, etc.  This is assignment was, actually, rather confusing at first, but once Dr. Parker went over it with us, it was a breeze and tremendously helpful.  I had not known before how to do any of the things in the assignment or how to accomplish any of the learned tasks from this assignment.  It was extremely helpful.  Learning how to use the magnifier and print screen, as well as toggle keys and the accessibility keyboard, will be of great worth to me in the future.  I thought I knew computers before taking this class, but I obviously had a lot more to learn.  I think that this assignment would fall into the CC objective of presentation of knowledge and ideas: Making strategic use of visual displays of data to enhance understanding.

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/asun.html