Week One Comments: What we want to learn, what we will learn, etc.

Hi all,

Since everyone is writing a blog, I thought I would too. I'll probably make some comments on your blog entries, and talk about various random items related to class and technology in education. I won't post anything critical to class here, so its up to you if you want to read or not. But, you might find some things interesting.

First, I have to say that I enjoyed reading everyone's first blog entry, and I now have a much better idea as to where everyone stands in their technical knowledge. For some, many of the 'technical' things we will learn will be review. For others, it might be brand new. There seems to be a wide variety of skills, but I hope that everyone will learn a lot from this course, regardless of entering skill level. And please feel free to make suggestions.

Alot of people mentioned that they were interested in learning how to integrate technology into teaching. This is definitely something we will discuss in class. Several people also mentioned PowerPoint. We'll work on both making effective presentations and learn how to create an interactive program (i.e., a game, practice activity, etc.) using PowerPoint. Excel was also a program a lot of people said they didn't know much about. In this class, we'll learn how to enter data, make some calculations, and create charts. Feel free to preview the assignments in the course website.

I'll also work on posting some resources, interesting/informative websites, etc. to the class website throughout the course.

On a separate note, I enjoyed reading that several of you had computer courses in highschool (and even gradeschool). It's hard for me to even believe this (and it shows that I'm older than I might look), but I had never even accessed the internet before I went to college (we got Windows on our school computers my junior year of highschool), and I didn't get my own computer until I went to grad school. Now, I can hardly imagine what I did without them...

Of course, computers are becoming more and more common in school, and it will be interesting to see how this changes education. We'll talk about how this might or might not impact learning this semester.