Thursday, October 17, 2013

Journal 8

Focus Question:
How can teachers use email or instant messaging services to foster information exchanges with and among students?
Technology has become such a necessity in students’ lives. Whether they are using them to talk with their friends, email, game, or social media students always have their devices on them, adolescents are the biggest users of these technologies. Many teachers, especially in older grade settings, use emails to get in contact with their students to relay messages about class or any assignments that have been given. Emails are one of the easiest and most time efficient ways to get information across to students, parents, or other teachers. As for instant messaging teachers typically stay away from that sort of technological resource due to informal language used along side the messages. Almost everyone has email on their smart phones and can access them at any point during the day, this being so close at hand makes teachers lives a lot easier in relaying messages to students, teachers, and parents outside of the classroom!

Tech tool:
8.1 Teacher website and blog-building resources
This tech tool explains in depth about all the different ways teachers can go about using the Internet and blogs to create informational pieces for students, parents, and other teachers. There are so many options that teachers have when creating a website or blog ranging from cost, build your own sites or there more cost efficient sites that have pre-made templates you can download and use.  Dreamweaver is a good example of a site that is helps you create your own site or blog. TaskStream, go Daddy, and eblogger are all sites that have pre-made templates available to the public to use and plug in information.  There is also an open source software program you can use also to create sites and blogs such as Moodle. Moodle provides discussion boards, email options, instant messaging, and discussion forums for school districts and individual classrooms.
Photo credit to TechmansWorld on google images


Summary:
Chapter 8 is all about the use of Internet in transmitting information different ways to students through the Internet and technological resources.  To me this chapter is very informative on how to access the internet, emails, instant messaging, wikis, websites, and blogs to provide information to students outside the classroom or for them to use as a reference to a current project or assignment that they are working on. I was not currently up to date on all the different sites mentioned in this website like the wiki or any type of build-your-own website or blog. This class has now gotten me comfortable in using each of those different sites and I have grown accustomed to using them. The Internet can really provide anything and everything a teacher needs to put information in a place so that all of their students, parents, and other teachers can easily access it.



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