Hopefully my vlogs will be getting better as time goes on, but h

So, what drove me to start this blog?  Well, I am creating this blog as a part of my Spring class, Ecmp 355.  Why am I taking this class?  I got inspired during the Winter semester to fill my teacher toolbox with technology related things while I attended a seminar at the University called Web 2.0 in the Classroom.  It was probably the most informative seminar I have ever been to and definitely peaked my interest in technology and using it to my students and my advantage, the whole time I was there I was frantically typing on my computer.  I will probably post many of the things I learned there in this blog later throughout the course.  I was so excited for this course that I actually read the Preface to the textbook for this course, titled Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, written by Will Richardson.  In the preface I came across a quote that I felt a connection to, "A growing majority of students are immersed in social networks and technologies outside of school, and most have no adults in their lives who are teaching them how to use those connections to learn." (Richardson, page ix)  What I got from this is that students are using technology outside of school but they don't know enough about it connected to real learning, only using it for social networks and to 'look things up', so as a teacher I have to make myself aware of the different ways learning can occur on the internet so I can share that with my students and be successful at doing so.

For this week's tech tasks in the class I am in we were asked to design our blogs so I decided to keep mine bright and fun because I feel that reflects my personality...hopefully you all will agree with me once you get to know me a little bit!  I also love photography...but I can call myself an "attempter" in this category as well, so I added one of my own photos to the top of this blog page and I will probably be posting some of my other photos as well.  Hope you like it!  I also added my twitter to my home page, which I just recently started but I think I'm getting the hang of it, #maybe?  I changed some of the fonts to suite me as well and I'm also keeping everything pretty simple just until I can get a handle on all this blogging stuff.  Expect edits in the future!