Reflections on the course

Here are my impressions of the learning opportunity we had with this online course exploring Web 2.0 Technology.  I was generally familiar with the existence of much of the technology introduced in the course, but the hands on experience I had with it all has really shown me a lot of application that I can use in my teaching. We all have a responsibility to be aware of and strive to meet the changing learning needs of our students, and having those needs spelled out in the beginning of the course was definitely helpful to me.  In the beginning, I wasn't really even aware of my own learning goals as far as this course is concerned, and I felt the structure of the course was effective in helping me realize what I knew and what I didn't.  The hands-on experience in each learning module was invaluable to getting the material across, but unfortunately, I tended to go straight to the learning activities and see how far I could get own my own, with the intuitiveness of the technology we were studying.  I look forward to spending more time with the videos and reading this summer when I have a little more time. I definitely plan to implement some of these tools in my own teaching, and I would be open to continue learning through some sort of continued course or community.

Module 5

For several years, I have had as a pary of my private lesson course syllabus a list of attributes of sucessful students. Without actually requiring and grading certain assignments or general behavior, I am able to loosely monitor the "habits of success" that my students display (or not).  One of these attributes is "Reads about his/her instrument daily."  A great many of the Web 2.0 tools we've investigated in this course would be of help in "reading about their instrument" , including RSS Feeds, and tagging.  Im going to suggest (require) all students to maintain a blog reader, and share interesting posts and web articles they find with the class.  I'll be doing the same.  However, I need more help understanding how to tag items...

Dan