Technology Blog - Week 5

I spent a good part of this week away from my home and my computer.  I started the week (just as I had ended last week) in Homestead, Florida visiting one of my Florida Virtual School Blended Learning Labs.  I was able to spend 2 days working face to face with some of my virtual students.  This does not happen very often in my position, and I really enjoyed being able to see my students in person.  I have visited the school 4 times this year, and this was my last trip.  It was frustrating to see how much the technology was holding them back.  The lab suffers from malfunctioning laptops, slow internet, intermittent wifi, and not enough student workstations.  I think that if we are going to use technology in our classrooms to teach our students, that technology needs to work!

I reviewed Solfeggio Maestro 6 this week for my project.  I found the program to be very frustrating at first, until I really explored the creation tools.  By inputting a set of parameters, the program would actually auto-generate sight-reading exercises based on those parameters.  It was quite impressive.  I have spent a lot of time in the front of my classroom composing brief sight-reading exercises on the spot, and this program would save me a lot of time and frustration.  It is easy to pinpoint an exact skill on which you want to work, input the parameters, and get brief examples that are exactly what you need.  The biggest downside, as I discussed in my review, is that you are unable to print the examples for use at a later time.

After checking out my Feedly page and posting on my Twitter feed and Google+ account, I felt very frustrated that we had another social networking page to explore.  The layout and interface of Diigo are clean and easy to use, and I do prefer it to the Google+ group.  My biggest problem is that I already have multiple social networks active (both personally and professionally).  Therefore, I don't see myself adding Diigo to my professional or social life after this class.  I do think that it is possible to become too connected and have too many places to explore each day or week.  They all tend to blend together and I think involvement in too many networks (personal or professional) can be counterproductive.

I really enjoyed  listening to my classmates' remix projects this week.  I think that one of the best parts of this course is that we have been able to listen to and discuss each other's work.  Some of my classmates have expressed their frustration with those assignments, and I feel as though I have been able to lend a bit of support and encouragement to them as they move on through the class.  I have felt very comfortable with the technology we have used throughout the course, and I am glad that I have had the opportunity to help my classmates, if even for a brief moment.