"Farewell my friends...until we meet again"

EDM 310 with Dr. John Strange has been the most enlightening, frustrating, fantastic, time consuming class I have participated in my educational career. One thing I can say for sure is that no matter how much time it took, how frustrated I got, this class was worth it! I learned how important technology is. Blogging can actually be educational, youtube holds more than entertainment, that things do not have to cost an arm and a leg to use (there is almost always a free version somewhere), and Google is more than a search engine. Technology is so important in our society today, and as a future educator I realize the importance to use technology in my classroom. The children of tomorrow deserve to learn anything they can about the world around them, and what better way to connect them to it than other blogs around the world.

Thank you Dr. Strange for instilling technological literacy, for continuing to change the schools one future educator at a time. I have learned so much from your class, without the endless notes, quizzes, multiple choice test, i.e. burp back education.

To my fellow classmates, I hope to visit your future classrooms one day through the use of a screen and Skype. :) 

Honest Reflection

This semester has been full of its ups and downs. I would like to concentrate on the ups in this post. I have learned about so many fantastic tools that I can use everyday in and out of my classroom that are free! One of my favorite things that I have learned about this semester is Aviary. It is an image editing program that does everything from screen capturing to adding really cool details to photos. I love it! You can check it out by clicking here. Another great tool that has been implemented in this course is blogging! We used blogger to set up personal blogs to keep track of our assignments. i can definitely see me using a blog in my classroom, to publish my students work and help keep the parents informed about what is going on in the classroom. My favorite assignment for this class was comments4kids. We commented on students blogs from around the world. I had so much fun with this! There are so many resources we learned about that will continue to help me, such as ALEX and ACCESS, Google Documents, Skype, Delicious, and iTunes. I will continue to further my literacy in technology because that is the future.

My Sentence

So, I have been thinking about what my sentence is for a while, and it is not an easy thing to come up with. It is also something that is a work in progress, and could change at any moment. However, right now, I think the words that sum up my life as of right now is...

My name is Chelsie Marie Funderburg, and I am a future educator that will embrace technology in and out of the classroom.

Interview

I will post the link to my interview as soon as Dr. Strange can get it to me!

Thanks Dr. Strange for your help!

PLN Part 2

This semester I have been constantly meeting new people, visiting websites, and learning about technology that can be useful for me when I have my own classroom. At the beginning of the semester we began establishing our PLN, personal learning network. So far, I have used Skype, Facebook, and Twitter to keep and establish relationships between future teachers like me. Some more things I have added to my PLN is ACCESS and ALEX, which are websites dedicated to help further education on all kinds of topics. The Khan Academy is a website with tons of instructional videos that can be used as supplemental activities to any lesson. There also tons of educational blogs that I will continue to visit to see how present teachers are handling technology is their classes. I have been using Delicious to help keep track of all of the resources I find that will be useful to me in the future. A PLN is a great resource, and mine will continue to grow!