Blog Journal 10

I learned many new and valuable skills from working on the assignment 5 powerpoint interaction. I have done many powerpoint presentations in the past, but none requiring me to make an interactive game. Honestly, this assignment did challenge my technology skills and I was not the biggest fan of the project. I spent many hours tediously making each slide with pictures, facts, and ensuring each part went together. At the end of the assignment, I was pleasantly surprised with how well it looked. In the future, I don't think I would refer to powerpoint to make an interactive game like this for my students, I would most likely use Kahoot or another similar platform.

I think that surveys are a great way to assess student's feelings towards what they would like to see in the classroom. As a teacher, I believe that having a beginning and end of the year survey would help in constantly evolving the classroom to fits students needs and wants. In the beginning of the year, my students could take a survey asking what their expectations are for me as a teacher and what they are most looking forward to that school year. For an end of the year survey, students would reflect on their likes, dislikes, and what could be done better. I would make notes of these improvements that can be made and adapt accordingly at the beginning and end of each school year.

I always enjoy reading my classmates blogs and seeing the different ways they have set up their blog site, especially the way they are all designed! I enjoyed reading Annelise's recent blog post pertaining to the data collection assignment we recently completed. In her blog, she talked about using surveys to ask her class if they did or did not like projects/assignments, which sounded like a great idea! I will definitely have to keep this in mind for my own classroom one day.

Before this class, I had never heard about tech-flex or digital badges. I believe that after reading and learning about what each of them are to be used for, I have found that they provide quite useful in advancing oneself in the field of technology. Though I have yet to get digital badges of my own, I am looking forward to gaining some in the near future. I believe that they will highly benefit me and will encourage my peers to consider gaining some as well.

In the future, I would love to learn more about different search engines and if there are any differences between them, if any. Google is always my go-to search engine when looking up articles, websites, or getting answers to questions. However, I know that Bing and Yahoo are major search engines are well that are not as widely used. I would be interested to know if the search engines have difference between them and if they could offer different resources depending on what is being asked.