Final reflections

So over the last 7 weeks I have been evaluating and testing different web 2.0 education tools.  There has been many different kinds from social bookmarking to aggregated pages.  I think the main thing that I have learned from all of it is that if you are looking to use tools for education they can come from anywhere and be anything.  This really is the great thing about tools like this is that that is what they are tools.  However unlike physical tools that really only have one purpose you can often adjust these digital tools to fit what you need them to be.  Like take twitter for example.  Twitter can be a huge time waster and or just a way to check up on what your favorite celebrity is doing but if you show people the power of twitter and how you can really use it it can become a very powerful learning tool.  Like I said in my previous post I didn't create much content but I did consume quite a bit and if you follow the right people twitter can be a very powerful professional development tool.  Aggregated pages could be a way to just get your news but it could also be a way for you to communicate with your parents about upcoming things in your class or information that your students could use.  Social bookmarking can be used to share articles for professional development or it could be used to share with your student research articles to help them with their research paper.   I think this has been the biggest take away from this class is that if you have a need there is probably a technological solution you just have to be creative and search for it.  There are a few downsides to the technology though.  I think that to use any new technology there is a little bit of a learning curve for you students.  You have to teach them how to use it before you can use it for whatever you want to use it for.  Of course if you use technology that they are already using such as twitter and other popular apps for learning then this learning curve does go away.  I think in the future I, as a teacher, am going to try and find technological solutions that my students already use I will just try and re purpose them for what I need them to be. 

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