September Reflections

At our Sept. meeting, we became acquainted with one another as well as the purpose, hopes and dreams of the Technology Integration Academy cohort. The wide range of age, years of experience, academic expertise, the size of districts and availability of technology makes for an excellent and exciting learning environment. As one who learns best in a collaborative group, I am looking forward with anticipation as well as some insecurity to our work together.

Much of our introduction to the changes in the way information is created and dispersed is a reminder of the theory classes I took as part of my MLS in 2005. The theory has not changed much but the tools have been transformed in such a short period of time. By the end of the weekend, I have to admit that I was partly inspired and partly overwhelmed. We looked at so many online tools: Comic Life, Photostory, Googledocs, Twitter, to name just a few.

We had a lot of fun creating our personal learning networks. I really wish I had saved mine after doing it in Gliffy and Wordle. It would be fun to do again at the end of the course and compare the two.

The link below to A Brave New World was awesome and I promptly showed it to the tech committee at my school as well as my principal. They were impressed but because of several tech issues at our school and the delay in getting our laptop project going were also discouraged that we have difficulty envisioning ourselves becoming a part of this new world.

A Brave New World-Wide-Web (David Truss)

Another to share:

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Michael Wesch)