7 weeks later...

In just 7 short weeks I've gone from dreading a technology class to being really excited to start a classroom blog for my students and parents next year! I wasn't expecting to learn much if anything that I'd actually use in my classroom going into this class. Having one desktop as the only available technology, my attitude always was that it's easier to not use technology then to try. In this class I've been exposed to a wide variety of tools and am walking away with a handful of ideas that I can see myself using in or for the classroom. These tools include: Google products specifically Google docs, voicethread, animoto and blogger. 

The biggest change to my classroom next year will be a classroom blog for parent communication, providing information, pictures, student work and at home practice for students. I will use animoto for picture slideshows of things we do in the classroom as well as making digital flashcards and voicethread for making digital versions of our class books. I think google docs will be helpful in creating out team lesson plans. 

Other fun tools I found that I will use for classroom decor are quotes cover and tagxedo. Quotes cover is a fun tool to explore for making beautiful quotes to hang in your classroom, see my blog post about it! And tagxedo uses words to create art. 

In reflecting on this class I decided to make a tagxedo. I have used products like this to enter my students names for a welcome poster at the beginning of the year, but this week I learned that if you enter a keyword or url then tagxedo will create a word cloud for you! I entered my blogs url and created a beautiful piece of word art that sums up what I have learned over the past 7 weeks. The more commonly used a word was in my blog, the bigger it appears.