The End of the Beginning

In just a few short weeks, I feel like I have learned so much and yet realize that I have just begun to scratch the surface of the many multimedia tools we had the opportunity to experiment with. Prior to this course I had heard of many of the tools that we used, but hadn't actually played around with them much. I am eager to start the next school year with all these new tools in my repetoire, and I know it will help my students not only get excited about learning, but also help them develop 21st century skills.

Of course, I know that I cannot successfully implement all these tools at once. Last year I used a wiki for my AP World History course. I plan on improving my use of this wiki by implementing some of the ideas from this course, such as assigning feedback to certain articles for everyone to share. Another multimedia tool that I would like to incorporate into my courses is blogging. Many of my students have done blogging for other courses, but I have not jumped on that bandwagon yet. I plan on showing my students Google Reader to help organize the blogs they are following (a tool that has really helped me in this course). I'm also very excited to implement some image tools in my courses, such as Animoto, Picasa, and Flickr. I know my students will enjoy these simple tools that produce real results in a small amount of time. By the second semester of the year, I'd like to move on to making movies with Windows Movie Maker, I-Movie, or Photostory 3.

One person that I am following for this course (and plan on continuing to follow after this course) is Will Richardson. We were introduced to Richardson through his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. I think Richardson is a good person to follow because he is someone that is really immersed in 21st century learning. In following Richardson's blog, I also get a lot of advice from other professionals that are interested in 21st century learning, so I feel like I get more bang for my buck when I read his blog. In the short time I have been following Richardson, I have already been introduced to the importance of keeping abreast of new tools, participating in blogging, editing wikis, and participating in professional conversations on a regular basis, and have been made aware of many other professionals who are interested in the best way for our students to learn and succeed. In addition to Richardson's blog, he also Facebook's (where I learned that Richardson is a fellow Cub's fan), http://twitter.com/willrich45, Flickr's, and Skype's to mention just a few.

I have really enjoyed this course and look forward to implementing these great tools in my classroom next year. I also plan on sharing these tools with our school librarian in the hope that together we can introduce the rest of the school to some excellent multimedia tools.