EDUC560

Educ560 Integrating Technology, is a class that is out of the ordinary. It is interesting yet challenging. The internet world and computer world are always growing fast and improving, so one has to keep up to date. Although I know a lot about the basics, especially MS, but you can't know everything. I take this as a moto in my life, so I take advantage of everything to learn the most. Therefore, this class is very helpful in keeping us up to date with the internet changes.

Creating blogs is one of it... Although it was a requisite of this class, i have come to enjoy writing things, and thinking about topics to post for class... It was a way for me to write about the things that are interesting to me, and also what is inspiring. So I found this as a way to express myself, using pictures words, or any other thing possible to get my message around. The link to my blog is found below:
noorsalloum.blogspot.com

In addition, we have learned how to do business cards. Although it is not so hard to learn and to apply, and one can simply do it on their own, it is nice to have taken it in class, having the teacher giving us guidelines, commenting on our designs, and correcting our mistakes. In addition, to giving us ideas that would result in a look  that would be as to professional as possible. For example, not using too much pink colour, so it does not too girly. Rather keep a neutral colour, to look more professional, and elegant. It is all in the first impressions you make. And the type of your business card, is one of the first impressions people make. And based on it, they would approximate how competent you are in your field.

Moreover, we are learning new techniques of which we can implement in our classes. These new techniques or programs are new and are interesting. They up to date, as our teaching skills and methods should be. One of these programs was "mouse Mischief" by Microsoft. I found this program  to be of much interest. It is a new way to involve the students in the instruction. It includes several option, of which students can choose the best answer(s), matching, and circling the correct answers. In addition, it has features that can promote safe competition, for example, having a countdown, or the fastest would be recognized... This was interesting, and fun. It was done on PowerPoint. I enjoyed doing a presentation, that can be used in real classes... Learning new techniques will definitely help the students to be motivated and encouraged in class, and to stay focused during instruction.

Another requirement of this class was doing a web-quest. This was challenging. I have had a little bit of hard time adjusting with what web-quests meant, and what their purpose was. But after several searches, and having picked a topic, I was able to get focus and finally know what i was doing... This was done in pair. We had picked a topic, it was the phases of the moon. It had a description of the project that the students had to do, and as well as what the teacher would do. A link to the web-quest is found below:
https://sites.google.com/site/picturethemoon/

Then after we finished with the web-quest we had a new assignment. It was to do a poster, again using PowerPoint. Designing the poster was not the problem, the problem was in summarizing the information as much as possible, from a 24-page study that has been previously done in a previous class. This was challenging, as it is essential to have a lot of ideas there to be fully understandable but yet had to be designed in a way to be attractful to the eye. You know you have 3 seconds to attract someone to read the poster. So this was a bit challenging. It took several trials of arranging and rearranging the item of the study to come up with a design that i was finally convinced of. A link to the poster is found bellow:
http://noorsalloum.blogspot.com/2012/04/influence-of-parents-socio-economic.html

Then our final assignment in this class is the Project. This project is on a much bigger and a wider range than the web-quest. We would have to design a project, that would direct the teacher what to do and how to do it. Again, finding a suitable topic was challenging, because we wanted something to be interesting, beneficial, and yet be easy to be applied. It is motivating to have to plan a whole unit of instruction to suit the students and the teachers, and thus to be able to apply everything that we have learned in this class to pull up this huge project. Again, this project is in pairs, but different pairs this time. So my partner and I choose, to do about the kinds of pollution, and how it effects our lives, of which the students would keep a diary of their daily contributions to pollution... This is not due until a couple of weeks, so we have to wait and see how the process goes...