Goodbye TPTE 486...

I am very sad to say that today was the last day of TPTE 486. I have really enjoyed this class this semester and unlike my other classes I looked forward to going to class. I think that I have learned so many great things that I will be able to use in my classroom one day. I have learned how to use many of Web 2.0 tools such as: Wordle, Animoto, VoiceThread, Blogger, Smilebox, and Wikis. I think that the best thing about this class was learning how to write a lesson plan, making the website and learning how to use some of the Web 2.0 tools. I do not think that I will use all of the tools but a lot of the tools I found very useful and easy to use. I know that the faculty is talking about getting rid of the lesson plan part of the curriculum but I think that this was a very important part of the class. It was my first experience writing  lesson plan so I thought it was good, but I know there were some in the class that have written many lesson plans so they did not find it very helpful. I also liked the fact we got to teach each other how to use the Web 2.0 tools. I found the presentations to be very helpful, but I also think that they took up a lot of class time sometimes as well. Some of the tools were much easier to explain to the class than others. The ones that were more advanced like Animoto and Prezi, it was very difficult to create one with the class and still have time to do our other classwork. Also, I know it was frustrating for some people who were prepared to do their project on a certain day but then their presentation day got pushed back. If we did multiple presentations in a day it was hard to finish what we needed to finish in class. There was also a lot of information given in class and we were not always sure what we needed to have done before the next class. When Dr. B created the blog about what we needed to do for each class it made it much easier to follow along. I also do not think that there really needs to be a day by day syllabus for this class because it was not always the right assignment on the right day. Overall, I really enjoyed this class and I thought that it was very useful and I learned a lot of very interesting tools that can be used in the classroom.