weekly reflection 4/22/09

I am actually kinda pumped right now, and will do this reflection for the last few days. If I do not do it now, I will be busy trying things and may forget to reflect most of what I am doing. First off I have two chapters left in Disrupting Class (which I will finish soon). I have finally found some answers for my senior high students who have low math grades and need my class to graduate. I dropped the written text very early this year and have been struggling with what curriculum to use. I used as a guide the MCA standards because now I have juniors with seniors and they must pass the 11th grade MCA's. This book gives me a sense that I have been heading in the right direction and if I continue to use technology may be able to find approaches and lessons that will spark that intrinsic motivation.
Related to this, is the need to organize what I am doing and hope to do. One thing I have been working on this week is researching tagging. As I showed in class Wednesday night my i Google is a useful tool for me and I will continue to use it well after class. I have unsubscribed many email posts and run them through my RSS feeder so I can scan and book mark in one place. I have read a few articles about tagging and right now it seems slower for the PC's than MAC but i am such a novice now that they have enough for me. I like the idea of not having to weed through all my files that have similar words instead using specific files that have uniques tags which link them together. Will try to explain this more in my class presentation, this is what I think I am going to do. I still keep playing with voice threading and interactive video. I was able this week to link my voice to lessons on the smart board and have spent about 2 hours today downloading Skype and hope to have it set up soon. This all said any one of these could turn out to be my final project. This class has been a great teacher that the more I learn, the more I know I need to keep everything organized, otherwise I go back to it and do not remember what I did or can not find the same site or directions.
I have to say I am hoping I do not go onto our Concordia site and find I have a whole different assignment I need to address.