EDUC561

At university, there is a chance for us as future teachers to attend an Educational Media and Technology course during our TD spring semester. This course in to introduce teachers to technology and how it can be implemented in our classrooms nowadays. In other words, it sheds the light on the additions that media and technology are able to provide for teachers to facilitate their teaching and make it more productive and less traditional.

Until now, we have covered different projects in this course which all represent a fruitful addition to our repertoire of knowledge about effective teaching practices. Our first activity was very simple and helpful which required us to use Microsoft Publisher and design our own business cards as teachers to be able to use to introduce ourselves later on. Another activity was registered for a webinar online and attending it (in this blog there is a post explaining in detail what the webinar was about and how I benefitted from it).
Later, we moved to activities that were more related to what we were going to present to our students in class. Starting with the scientific poster which, in my case, was a representation of a case study on a bilingual child which I previously conducted in my undergraduate Bilingualism course. This poster, if used effectively in a classroom, will have the ability to help students visualize and actually see what the teacher is intending to send them. It is a hard copy representation of what was previously explained in abstract terms.
Another project was designing a web quest which is a technological process for teachers to present a prompt of a project for students with detailed tasks and procedures along with available links they can use in this project or research they are required to perform. The teacher in this way acts as a facilitator for students and guides them through all the phases of accomplishing this task.
Blogging is something we were also introduced to in our Educational Technology and Media course which had us all eager to think about what interests us and just type it down and receive our friends' comments on it.
This course is definitely going to be an addition to us and to all other teachers who register it.