Thing 1 - Diigo

Diigo will be a great tool for me to use. I am always finding stuff on-line that I find useful and now I will have a way to highlight the things I thought were important to me. After I am done highlighting and adding post it notes (one of my favorite things ever!) I can then save it to my library. I think that the way you save things in diigo is what will make it the most useful. You can add a description of what you have saved along with tags to help you search for it later. This will be a big time saver!

My diigo address:
http://www.diigo.com/user/vandermeulen

Thing 1 - Shortcuts

After learning a few of the shortcuts that you can use with the Microsoft Office products I can see many of the time saving benefits. Being a band director I play two roles, a teacher and a secretary. I create and use many forms and letters so these new shortcuts will be great to use. I took one of the forms that I created and made some alterations using the new shortcuts I have learned. Here is what I did:

As I was creating this it was hard to remember to use the shortcuts because I am so use to using the old way. I think it will take some time to retrain myself to use the new, more efficient way of creating and editing my documents. I was planning on going through all of my documents this summer to rework them and I am glad that I will be able to use these new shortcuts!

What I Have Discovered About Blogs

To get a better idea of how blogs work and how they could help me in my classroom I looked at many examples. After seeing what is out there right now, I found that the best blogs were well organized, simple to read and find information and they had good content that was worth reading and exploring. I think that there would be many ways that I would be able to use a blog in my classroom. I would be able to create a discussion with my students about various musical topics such as concert critiques or performing artists. I would also be able to use this tool to provide information about the band program. I am excited to see how this will enhance my students knowledge of music next year!

What I hope to learn

By taking the class 21 Things for the 21st Century Educator I am hoping to learn more about technology and how to use it in my classroom. I am pretty comfortable with the basics of technology like how to get around on the internet and social networks like facebook. I am also pretty comfortable troubleshooting my computer when it is doing something I do not like. I feel that there is much more out there that I could be learning about and using for myself and to make me a better educator. I am looking forward to diving in deeper and seeing how I will be able to use the knowledge I gain from this class with my middle school bands next year!