Another week has passed in Educational Technology and I once again find myself struggling to string words together to describe all that I have learned from this week’s lessons.
It feels strange to not have a dozen or so tech explorations to discuss. Oddly, I kind of missed doing them this week…but not too bad. The tech explorations have been some of the most informative assignments that I have ever had and the resources that I have gained from them will be a great benefit when I begin my teaching career.
This week’s assignments focused on exploring the world of webquests and creating our own webquest. I found this week’s assignments to be challenging and the creation of the webquest was very time consuming. Dr. Goldberg’s warning to not wait to complete the assignment was more than appropriate. I found myself struggling with time constraints this week while trying to juggle Easter activities, my work, my son’s spring break activities, and class work. Somehow I manage to get through it without melting down.
Time was not the only challenged I encountered while trying to complete the webquest assignments. There were a few other areas that proved difficult during this week’s assignments. One area that was probably the most frustrating was computer issues. It seemed like it took me about as much time this week to get my computer to work properly as it did to actually complete the work. The Questgarden.com site did not seem to want me to register for the free trial which turned into a 2 day process before I was successfully registered. The submit button did not work for me which must have been an ongoing issue based on the note on top of the registration page with instruction on how to address the issue. Only one problem…the instructions did not fix the issue. For some reason it appeared as if I had registered and was logged in, but for some reason I was not able to navigate the website without entering a login and password. When I entered the login info I continually received a prompt indicating that there was no matching account. Yet, on the “member dashboard” page it showed me as being already logged in. Eventually I gave up and worked on another class. Then, when I logged back in the next day I had to register for the 30 day trial again. This time it was successful.
The Webquest discussion offered another challenge for me as I found it difficult to find webquests that were created for use in the elementary/middle school special education setting. I plan on teaching in this area and it appeared that there were little or no webquests geared specifically toward this particular audience.
At the end of the week I feel that I have gained some valuable resources and knowledge from the webquest assignments that I will apply in my classroom…soon hopefully!
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