Out With the Old and in with the New

So far my experience with integrating technology into the classroom has been a positive experience. At the beginning of the semester I was reluctant to think that I would be a technologically savvy teacher, but at the midpoint of the class I am feeling very comfortable with using certain tools within my for my future classroom. Some of my favorite tools (ones that I will certainly use in my classroom one day) would be blogger, Google Sites, webquests, Google Docs, and scavenger hunts. Blogger would be a great tool to use in an elementary school classroom as an online journal and would allow access to involved parents. Google Sites would benefit me as a teacher to inform parents of classroom announcements and activities. Webquests and Scavenger hunts would be a fun, exciting, and unique way to incorporate technology into a classroom setting.

Some tools I did not enjoy using and ones that I don't think I would use in my classroom would be Glogster and Picasa. I did not enjoy using these tools, Glogster lost my work and I could not fully recover it after I published it. My fellow classmates (the Glogster "Pros") claimed that the site sometimes did this and you just had to press refresh until it was recovered your lost information--this did not work and I was unable to embed this project onto my website. Picasa, in my opinion, was very difficult to use and involved many steps that were tedious and time consuming. These are two tools I would not use in my classroom.
Overall, my experience with technology has been very positive, I feel like using technology is going to be a great tool to use in my future classroom and my ideas and opinions about technology have positively changed since the beginning of the semester. I'm beginning to think, out with the old way of teaching, and in with the new!