Dustin's Blog over Delicious

Delicious is an innovative way to save bookmarks and share websites. It is also very useful in allowing individuals to access websites in an efficient manner. I will personally not be using the delicious site. The reason that I will not use delicious is because I do not have the time nor the patience to properly utilize the d site. As I previoulsy stated, delicious is a great tool for networking and would be highly useful for someone working in the business field. I just believe that for my line of work, physical education teacher, that this tool is not of utmost importance.

Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet is a very useful tool for teachers. In the school that I attended that is how all of the grades were kept. I enjoyed learning the different features of creating a spreadsheet, because as I stated previously, it is highly useful for teachers.
The reason teachers use spreadsheet is good is because it more convenient and easily accessible. With spreadsheet you can just punch in the grades and the program will calculate the grades for you. While I think that spreadsheet is a great tool, and plan on using it in my classroom in the future, I still think it is wise to keep a handwritten gradebook in case the computer system were to crash.

Dustin

Inspiration Blog

After watching the video over inspiration, I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. Inspiration is a great tool for organizing ideas. It makes allows you to brainstorm and construct a web for organizing your ideas. From my past experiences, brainstorming my ideas has been a confusing process because my ideas were all scattered and had no order. I wish that I would have had the opportunity to use a program such as this. This could be used in the classroom for writing papers, so that the students can organize their thoughts in an efficient manner.


I believe the best way to integrate technology into writing is by doing assignments that require the students to brainstorm ideas. The whole basis of inspiration is to assist the student in more effectively organizing their thoughts so that the writing process is much easier. Research papers can also be incorporated into this realm because inspiration allows you integrate web research and findings into the inspiration program.

I think that students can best help each other by getting into small groups of 3-4 people and take turns reading and critiquing each others papers. This allows for multiple perspectives on ideas and techniques to better improve the individual's writing style. I have participated in this technique in my education experience, and found it to be positively reinforcing and informative. I believe that it improved my writing because you can learn different things from other people. This also allows the teacher to mingle amongst the group and give the students feedback. As far as incorporating technology, blogging is an excellent way for the students to communicate. I have really enjoyed this experience and found it to be convenient and helpful. Reading other people's perspective and expressing my opinion and them doing likewise, has been an awarding experience so far.