Summer Adventures in WebTools for Teachers

I'm starting this blog to track my progress in learning how to integrate educational technologies more efficiently into my teaching (as part of a summer class through MSU called WebTools for Teachers).

I recently taught for a few years at a very "techno-friendly" school where each student was required to have a laptop and teachers were encouraged to make regular use of information technology in their teaching and in communicating with students, so I am not completely new to all this. However, I still feel very much overwhelmed and lost among the educational technologies of the 21st Century.

When I was first introduced to this "high-tech" learning environment, the computer became an additional vital organ for me, something I just couldn't live without. I took on board every web tool and software program that was introduced to us by the ICT specialists and figured out how to use it in my class: personal web page, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, software for making online surveys, movie making software, audio editing software, iStop animation, brainstorming programs, podcasts, news feeds... I realized I was probably not using the technology very efficiently when students started to become confused about where to go online to get assignments for my class, participate in online discussions I had set up, ask questions, etc. because I had so much going on at once. I was getting carried away by virtual gadgets and was way over my head in trying to manage them all.

I am hoping that this journey revisiting how to integrate technology into my teaching will help me find a more clear sense of direction when using some of the web tools that are available to teachers. The questions that I want to try to answer are:

• What is out there?
  
• How could I use it in my teaching?
• Would it REALLY enhance my teaching/ my students' learning or just create a distraction?