I will complain about one thing from class. Time management. I don't think there was any way each of us from my group of four could have presented for a whole twenty to twenty-five minutes. I know my presentation was closer to ten. I don't think that's entirely my fault. There isn't all that much to say about Dropbox. It's a cloud. You put all your music, videos, recordings, links, documents, and everything on there so that you and anyone you want can view it. Also, there are tutorials on the website. What I was able to give to the presentation that the online tutorials were not was how to apply Dropbox to the classroom.
I know that some of the other groups were able to spend extra time they had more effectively, but we weren't sure what to do for about forty minutes. This is not to say that we are lazy or didn't prepare as much, I just think we were concise.
The second half of class was interesting, but I am just a little too overwhelmed with all these different social networking sites to really get the fullest experience I can out of learning about google rss feeds. It's starting to make me feel a little crazy. You can link your Dropbox to your Facebook, and your Facebook to Twitter, where you can find my Weebly, and in case you'd like to see it, you can get to my Google+ from Weebly, and if you want to check out this google rss feed you can get there through Diigo, Facebook, Weebly, or Twitter, and you can get from most of these to the others, but only if you really know how to circumnavigate around the web, and you may or may not have to sign up for a couple of these sites if you want to view my content. Make sure you friend/follow/add me!!!!!!
Thanks for the candid reflections, Dylan. It is definitely the case that we envisioned the group members doing some speculating about how the various tools might be used in a classroom setting, or what their use might help to facilitate. Any thoughts about how a tool like Dropbox might be useful to you in the context of your Latin classroom, particularly given the way that it can make the process of privately accessing and sharing large files (video, in particular) much easier?
ReplyDeleteI agree, we are learning about a lot of different forms of technology and ways of interacting with different communities online, and it is all a bit overwhelming. I try and simplify my life by having the least number of accounts and profiles as possible. Working with all of these different online tools was a bit like account-overload. They all have different uses, and some are more suited than others for particular applications. I found the difficult part to be deciding which one most suits my individual needs, because I couldn't imagine trying to use them all. I mentioned in my post that I think eventually someone will develop one tool that just does everything. But until that day comes, I suppose we just have to try and sort through the tools that we do have. Did you guys just do presentations in your group, or did you get a chance to actually practice using the different tools? What did you think of them, and which one seemed the most useful to you?
ReplyDeleteHey Dylan, it seems you had almost the same reactions as I did to class on friday. While I did not blog about all of them, I too used about five minutes for my presentation and my whole group was basically done in the time it was supposed to take to give one presentation. I too enjoyed taking responsibility for the education of my colleagues but I think it would have been more enjoyable and productive if we could have done it for something that we will actually use. I am also overwhelmed with the amount of logins and websites we have been introduced to and doubt I will use 99% of them.
ReplyDeleteHey Dylan! I was also assigned Dropbox, and even though I thought it would be pretty easy to teach the next day, boy, was I wrong. I had created my handout with careful consideration to the other members in my group, but even so, we were probably the last group to finish "teaching" each other about the web applications. Based on your posting, it seems to me that this was not the case for many other groups. At first I was irritated with my "students' for not being able to grasp the simple application Dropbox was, and how many implications for teaching it had - I KNOW I was repeating myself at times!
ReplyDeleteBut then, I thought about this: what if this was a situation I found myself in next year, as a first year teacher where I would want every student to completely comprehend the subject matter. I took on my "teacher hat" then and there and keep explaining different aspects of Dropbox in various ways, even though I thought I was just saying the same thing over and over again, I wasn't. I was using different different vantage points so that all three of my students would be able to understand what I was trying to communicate to them. Even though it took a LOT of time to do this, it was worthwhile because everyone in my group "got it". I hope we are all able to accomplish this in our near futures as first year teachers.