Week Eight

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This quote summarizes the main idea behind learning how to integrate online tools in education. This week’s topic, I felt, was somewhat familiar to me as I have always integrated online web tools in my teaching and being a big Google fan, I was very happy to have Google Drive on that list of online tools. I have used Google Documents, Google Presentations, Google Forms, Google Spreadsheets in my line of instruction as they are always accessible by phone, laptop, desktop or simple any internet connection would make them available. 

I have used Google Sites and will continue to use as I feel it is a must for every teacher. I include extra credit activities using Google Forms, map creation activities using Google Maps, Voki, and Kidblog activities among many others.

However, I haven’t used a Wiki with my students, which I intend to do along with a Nicenet account for discussions. I believe it would be very interesting to see the students’ reaction to these tools. In addition, I would like to make use of the online exercise makers such as the Web Poster Wizard, Smile and HotPotatoes when I download the program to my computer.  I feel that we have learned about so many resources, that it will take forever to try to use and apply all of them. That’s why, I’ll be making a really long list of everything and choosing what to use for the next school year.

For this week, we were required to create an exercise, but since I have used most of the mentioned tools, I decided to share a form that I created for my final project. What I have done is create a questionnaire where I would be able to evaluate each participant’s technology skills and then be able to place them into groups based on their skills. The idea is to have an expert in every group who can support each member while working on the WebQuest which requires the use and integration of web tools. 

This is a very busy week for us all as we are all working on our final project drafts which are to be handed in to our peer for assessment. It takes so much time and effort to complete the whole form and I’m sure it will need more work after the process of peer assessment is over as I will be getting a different perspective on my work. 

I would like to wish myself and all of my fellow classmates the best of luck with the first step towards the final project. 

Nahla