IT 860 Course Reflection

This course has been an amazing experience for me. I was introduced to technologies I had not been exposed to. I was also forced to delve more deeply into technologies that I had been exposed to but had not yet taken to time to truly investigate. Through this course my eyes have been opened to many new possible integrations and I am very excited about this.
Dropi and Scribd are two technologies that prior to the class I was unaware of. I particularly like dropio’s ability to provide voice message and generate special access to this message. I really like Scribd’s only document hosting and the fact that these documents can be shared among many different people and also provide the user access to many other documents. Both of these hold great potential for classroom integration and I can’t wait to begin pushing this out to our educators.
I already had a good amount of exposure to Twitter, but the connections and access I gained from tweets by classmates has been great. Both YouTube and Screentoaster are products that are very familiar to me, however I have never used them together prior to this class and have discovered that using them together is very valuable. Voice Thread is a technology that I have been familiar with but prior to this class had never really put any real effort into. I am so glad that it was a course requirement because through this assignment I realized that this is another avenue for creating trainings for teachers with the additional benefit that teachers can comment on information presented. I am sure I will find this to be very valuable over the course of this next school year. Diigo like Voice Thread really came to life for me through the course assignment. I have actually used it for teachers in our district; however I never really paid attention to the benefits offered by the creation of groups. I have no doubt that educators that I train will find a lot of value in this. Second Life also came to life for me through course assignment. I am so excited about Second Life. I have no doubt that I will be using this technology a great deal over the course of my career. The educational value that I discovered is amazing. My one hope regarding Second Life is that they will create a version dedicated solely to education so that students at the primary and secondary level can benefit from it as well.
Like the course assignments the reading assignments were of great value as well. The readings provided much needed support regarding the productivity assignments. The philosophies discussed in the book only further justified the importance of Instructional Technology and fueled my passion to pursue this vein of work even further.
I feel that this course has provided me with much needed skill to become more successful in my current position than I have been in times past. I feel that through this course I have developed the needed foundation to continue this program on. The overall experience has been great. I have met and worked with some incredible people and hope to continue those relationships in the future.

Second Life, an online immersive virtual environment, is a very exciting way to interact with others at a distance. The way that it was used in this class was for participants to develop a web 2.0 project and present the project on a given day. The experience was absolutely amazing. Dr. Mark did an amazing job creating and organizing the alcoves in Second Life. This is the first time I ever really saw educational value for Second Life and I have been attempting to discover more about it for quite some time. I opted to present blogging in my alcove. Several avatars stopped by and had great discussions with me on the material posted there. Some people were even from foreign countries which I found to be very exciting. It allowed me to gain perspectives that otherwise I may not have been exposed to.
Utilizing Second Life provided me with a greater opportunity to interact with my classmates than any other experience in an online class so far. I really enjoyed the discussions that took place in Second Life. I was provided with very helpful tips and information from my classmates through this.
I have been brainstorming ways of utilizing this type of environment at the primary or secondary level. I feel like this type of learning environment would go far to increase the engagement level of students and further encourages their involvement in class discussions and other various class activities. My concern is that Second Life as it stands would not be appropriate at this educational level due to the lack of monitoring and openness of this O.L.I.V.E. I questioned Dr. Mark about this and he mentioned that there is a teen version of Second Life so my plan is to further investigate that. However, I have heard Marc Prensky state that if we could somehow duplicate what the gaming industry does for gamers in education that we would see increases. My thought is that is this environment could be duplicated by and educational marketer then perhaps we could fully integrate. If an educational software would develop a product that mirrors Second Life but brings the needed securities to the table then we could really take it to another level.
I really enjoyed my Second Life experience. I wish to learn much more and am very hopeful that the University of Southern Mississippi will include a more in-depth class on the creation and development of Second Life. I know that Dr. Mark would do an amazing job in facilitating this class and I feel that as a student I will get incredible value from it.