Thing 11.5 Evaluation

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning program?
I am excited about using a Screencast to help with my faculty instruction as well as our student instruction. I know that our LA SIS is interested in using Bookr. I"ll have to find a good way to sift through the Video Resources.
2. How has this prgram assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
Last year, I was able to present some Web 2.0 ideas to our faculty when they were writing their tech goals for the year and I hope to do that again this year. It gave some new options to teachers that had been doing the same old thing for the last few years. The students loved to see their Animotos, Wordles, and Smile Boxes sent to their parents' e-mails.
3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this that surprised you?
I always ask older students that I encounter what they've been doing in school technology-wise. My 18 year old nephew was with us for a few weeks this summer. He spent a lot of time on Facebook chatting with his girlfriend. I asked what kind of technology applications he uses in school. The answer was pretty much just PowerPoint. He had never heard of most of the Web 2.0 topics in our courses. His high school is huge and has a 50% dropout rate, so I don't think they have a lot of access to technology.
Also, I asked three graduate students (23 years old) at UNC if they had ever heard of Glogster, Bookr, Wordle, Word Sift, cloud computing, etc. They all said no. They are so busy researching they don't have time to just explore the web.
4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program's format or concept?
The program is SBISD's best technology offering and I appreciate the time it takes our lifeguards to read all the blogs.
I do think that both 23 things and 11.5 things are worth more hours. I already had experience with at least half of the content in this course and it still took me way more than 11 hours to complete.