Group 12 Meetings

Our group meetings this week went extremely well. We first meet on Monday night and worked on the group wiki project. We put all our assignmemnts on the chart and did the best we could aligning them to the National Technology Standards. I felt that alot of our assignments for this course align with the standards. All of our assingments force us to build on prior knowledge, explore new technology as a group and individualy, we learn about new technology and we communicate via technology (such as: model, wiziq, email, gchat, aol and even cellphones on occassion). I think the harderst part is taking what we have learned and incorporating them into the classroo, so that we as teachers meet the the technology standards. What I find to be the biggest challenge at my school, is that there is only one computer lab and one computer in my classroom. It makes it hard at times to have the students do alot of exploring on the computer. I do try to take advantage of what opportunities I do have and have them work on assingments in groups or individually on the computer. Another difficult obstacle to overcome is that many of my students do not have computers at home. Many of my students come from a lower economical stratus then many other students. Their parents simply cannot afford to have computers in the home. I have been trying to overcome this by finding places that they can go close to their homes that has free internet and computer axcess. What really amazes me is how technologically savey all these students are despite not having a computer in the house. They have been using computers in school since they were in Kindergarten so they are still digitial natives.

Our second group meeting this week we worked on our power point project. I think that it came out very well. We tried to keep it to a minimum number of slides, so that we will not have the dreaded death by power point. Also, we are going to attempt to not simply read from our slides, but use them as tool to enhance our presentations. I believe that this will keep with the spirit of what Dr. S has been telling us about power point all along.