Time Flies!

I cannot believe we are almost finished with week 5 and will be starting week 6, time really does fly! Since; my group met twice (once on February 11, 2009 and again on February 15, 2009) I am going to reflect on it in one blog. To start with February 11th's meeting, we met from 9:15p.m. to 11:45p.m. due to not only the missed class; but also because we had a lot to accomplish. We first discussed the links and the ISTE/NETS Standard # 4 and how we can incorporate technology in the classroom. We went over the rest of the links and I created accounts with del.icio.us, Diigo and Ning which I am still getting used to. It is helpful to have del.icio.us and Diigo on my Mozilla FireFox tool bar. I do like how Diigo highlights websites to make the information easier to obtain and not have to consistently go back to the site or try and copy/paste the information into a Word Document. As a group we then made our letterpop which was time consuming especially because only one person can work on it. However; the end result came out great and we did have fun working on it.
We decided to meet again on Sunday, February 15th from 7:30p.m. to 10:10p.m. to discuss any left over questions from week 4 and to also discuss the assignments which were initially due in week 4; but was moved to week 5 thanks to the teacher. Dr.S joined the session for at least 20 minutes which; was very helpful since she answered questions we had and told us we were doing a great job and are on track with everything. We spent a lot of the session making our group wiki project site look nice and professional, as well as creating our own sites to connect to the group site. After Dr.S added week 5 that night, I then uploaded the video: "What I Want for My Children" in the WizIQ session which; I found touching and although some what somber, it displayed an important message of how important children are to their parents and then showed a teachers point of view to the parents and the community. I thought it was nice to see a parents point of view since most of the videos have been about teachers and students point of views. We ended with looking at the link "Classroom 2.0" which we thought was interesting however; a group member raised a good point and said one must be careful in loading pictures of children since; not only does the person need permission from the school and the parents, one also has to be careful who is viewing the content of the site. Unfortunately, we are in a time when some people will use that content in ways we wish they would not; but it is something one, especially a teacher, must always keep in mind.