Greetings from Western Mass

Hi everyone,

Peter B-G here. It's great to be sharing this blog space with all of you. I've been looking forward to taking this class since I first saw it in the EDTECH course catalog. Like most EDTECH classes, it promises a healthy mix of theory and practice. I'm looking forward to dabbling in both familiar and unfamiliar multimedia technologies this semester, and hope that with the knowledge we can acquire about how people learn, we'll be able to create multimedia content that's both engaging and effective.

I am in my eighth year of teaching high school English and Journalism. Over the years I've been acquiring classroom computers. I now have 25 workstations in my room (17 PCs and 8 netbooks), so I've really been able to apply cloud and social media tools (Google Docs, Blogger, Twitter, YouTube) into my pedagogy. It's still a work in progress, and there are usually weekly glitches we need to overcome, but I feel that as a whole, my students and I are able to be more productive because of the way we've integrated technology into the classroom.

Below is a vocabulary video I created earlier in the year as an exemplar for a new assignment designed to teach vocabulary in a meaningful way. While the students have done a nice job creating their own videos, part of me thinks the assignment could benefit from some refinement, so the videos max out at one minute, rather than two. I'm optimistic that I'll learn something this semester that will give me insights into how I can make this assignment (and others) more effective.

P.S. Before I read about this assignment, I posted comments on most of your profiles on the Moodle page. This looks like a great mix of students. I'm especially excited to have a couple of English teachers as colleagues this semester. I look forward to learning about ways you've integrated EDTECH into your curriculum, and hopefully trying out some of your ideas in my own classroom. Cheers!