Reflection on Week 2 Assignments

I am finding the new types of technology that we are using in this class to be very interesting. Most of the sites that I was asked to go to for week two of this class are things that I have never heard of before. My favorite site that I was asked to go to is the delicious bookmarking site. Usually, I end up digging through old emails to find the URL for the Wikis that I use in my deaf education classes, but now all of the sites that I frequently visit are bookmarked and neatly organized for quick accessability.

I am also really enjoying looking at the blogs that other students have created for this course. I have never really thought of blogs or twitter as professional development tools, but I am quickly learning that they can be. It is refreshing to hear others ideas about teaching and technology, and the videos that my classmates posted really caught my attention. I previously thought that because this class was online, I was going to be much more isolated than if I had taken it in a classroom. However, I feel like I have the opportunity to talk to all of my classmates and see what they are thinking a great deal more than in many of my other classes, especially my large lectures.

I also am a fan of the rss reader that I have created because it sends all of the information from my collegues' blogs to one central location. It is so much easier when I can visit one page and click on different names to see the blogs that I haven't read yet.

Another thing that I have discovered is that it is easier for me to comment on other's blog posts than to write my own. I think that this is because other people's posts often spark an idea in my head or get me thinking, and it is simple to have a dialog back and forth with them about how their ideas relate to mine. However, if I am writing my own blog posts, I need to come up with an idea from scratch and that is sometimes more difficult.

There is one last thing that is still proving to be difficult. Learning how to work with technology easily becomes very time consuming because I need a lot of extra time to play around with the different forms of technology that we are using in this class before I can fully understand them. The labs that had video tutorials, however, really helped out this week because I could visually see how the different technologies worked before I attempted to create my own.