Happy International Potter Day! This morning after pulling myself out of bed following three hours of sleep following the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, we had our second meeting of Educ 504. The focus of today's meeting was professional twitter resources for educators, educational bloggers, and educational technology product reviews.
Coming away from today's guess presentation by Ms. Antonio Barkley (@antoniabarkley) I gained some valuable individuals to follow on twitter. I came in today expecting to gain some ideas about using twitter in a mathematics/physics class. However, today's lecture was much more along the lines of professional contacts and educational chats using twitter. Antonio's list of educational twitter contacts was extensive and I hope to gain some valuable ideas and networking contacts from these lists. The twitter chats she suggested is new to me. My experience with using #tags was along the line of following trends on twitter. I hope to join the #ntchat this Wednesday night at 8pm EST. This would be a first for me, so I hope to gain some valuable insight from this chat.
Our next discussion was on interesting educational bloggers to follow online. From a quick look at the list provided on the 504 wiki page, two blogs stood out for me. Built on Facts is a physics education blog, focusing on the instruction of theoretical physics from both a historical and pop culture point of view. I believe an important consideration when instruction those of the younger generation, one of the most important considerations in designing lessons is to make the lessons accessible and culturally relevant. The other blog I am interested in following is (Hurricane Maine). Hurricane Maine is a blog focusing on biology education. From a quick examination, of the blog. It appears to focus more on curriculum design and standards.
The most surprising part of educ504 today was at the end. An important project for this course is an educational product review. We were paired off with an individual to review a new educational product. My product to review is the Adobe Creative Suite 5. My eyes went big when I was handed the software. This is a $900 piece of software I get to play with on my pc for the weekend. I admit graphic design is my weakness when it comes to software, especially design with flash. It will be fun playing with it and seeing how the suite can help with my teaching.
