January 16, 2007

Power Point is neat to me because you can pretty much make your own video games. I think that using Power Point as an interactive tool in the classroom can be very effective, mainly because so few teachers use it as such. I don't know how many Power Point presentations I have sat through in my educational career not paying any attention at all because I knew that I was just going to go home and print the slides off the Internet and read them later. Teachers that teach in this manner could save us all a lot of time and energy if they would just e-mail the class the notes and we could learn from our beds.

However, Power Point interactive quizzes and games such as Jeopardy and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire are both exciting and useful for students because it is a break from the usual routine. Using this program to create assignments and interactive lectures always gets me excited all over again to be a teacher because I know that my students will enjoy learning in this way.

It took me a while to figure out what topic I wanted to focus on for this assignment; however, now that I have, I can't wait to go home and finish it!

YYaaaaayyyyyy!

Don't Techno for an Answer

Well, I didn't get to go to the first class meeting because of class schedule conflicts (I didn't think I was going to keep this class on my schedule for this semester, so I went to Fiction Technique which starts at the same time, but I dropped that one and kept this one. Yayy!), so I'm not sure what my initial reaction to this class is. However, I read over the syllabus and it seems like we'll be delving deeper into the computer programs we dealt with in the Intro to Tech prerequisite. Which is exciting because I thought that class was really neat and I made some pretty sweet powerpoints.
As often as I get frustrated with computers and technology in general (how do you program a DVD player? And WHY does Microsoft Word have a mind of its own?!), I recognize that it is a necessary force in out society and will only grow more and more prevalent. There is nothing I can do to stop it, so i'm going with it. That is, unless I wake up one day and ride the moving walkway down the hall to my kitchen where I can press a button that makes me already have coffee in my system and say "hello" to my mom in south Florida, face-to-LCD-screen-face. Then we might have a problem. Technology is great and our society has definitely benefited vastly from it; however, tech etiquette training has become a necessity (put the cell phone DOWN when you're ordering your latte. Thankyouverymuch.), so that is a big thing that I hope to get across to my students. Besides, of course, English.
At any rate, Power Points and film strips are amazing tools to use in the classroom, and nothing is worse than waiting for a teacher who can't figure out how to turn on the projector or make sound match up with the slideshow. So hopefully this class will make me the opposite of that teacher.
Thanks.