Final Reflection For Web 2.0 Class

These are my thoughts on the Web 2.0 class that Harrison Yang instructed.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the class. I have always enjoyed the format that Dr. Yang offers on his online classes. The discussion boards are valuable as people give different takes/opinions on class readings and make you think of topics in a different way. I also like to help people out on the discussion boards when they pose a question.

My favorite activity that we completed in this course was the social bookmarking activity. Whenever I take a course I feel like it was a positive experience if you can take away something from the course. In this activity I enjoyed finding new resources for my classes. I also like the website delicious and feel that it could really be an asset to a school if everyone would just share their resources with one another (what a data bank of resources that would be.)

By taking this web 2.0 course I feel that I have gained a little more insight on how to incorporate web 2.0 tools into my curriculum. This will definitely impact my students in a positive manner. I will be trying to incorporate more blogs into the learning as I feel that my class needs to incorporate more reading and writing (I teach web design).

In this web 2.0 class I had an unexpected outcome in that I realized that web 2.0 can be incorporated into Webquests. I have completed a Webquest in EDU 505 introduction to the internet (I think that class) and I had never really thought about incorporating web 2.0 into the assignment. By incorporating web 2.0 I think student collaboration can increase with a better final project as a result.

I have two suggestions for the class, the first one is that I think more time should be spent discovering web 2.0 tools and finding out how to incorporate them into your curriculum. An example of this could be that there is a "web 2.0 tool of the week" (such as wiffitti or wallwisher) in the discussion board area each person could describe a unit that would use it with and how they would implement it. The second suggestion that I have is I would get rid of the Webquest activity and replace it with creating a lesson (complete with resources, evaluation, prior knowledge, intro) for Facebook, Glogster, Animoto, Tagxedo or numerous other web 2.0 tools. It is not that I don't value Webquests it is that I have already completed one and I think the web 2.0 class should be entirely based around web 2.0 tools and incorporating them into the curriculum. (I do think that you can do that with a Webquest, I would just rather complete an activity utilizing Google Docs or numerous other tools).

I would be more than happy to participate in another discovery class like this one, as I have taken three other classes with Dr. Yang. I really value these courses and feel that it helps me be more of a lifelong learner and also use ideas from other people. As always I was very pleased with Dr. Yang's class and hope to enroll in more of his classes in the future.