Dreams of Teaching

I actually looked at a variety of sources and types of on-line learning options for this. I did a webinar from Learning Central on Computer Games as Educational Tools, which was more of a commercial for the company sponsoring it than informational. They did stress the limited number of participants in the educational gaming community, and the challenge in getting those with experience in gaming programming to apply it to the educational realm. This company does however, stress that educational games are most successful when integrated into the classroom and supplemented by teachers and other content. I did like that this group sees educational gaming as a tool rather than as something to replace more traditional resources.

However, I also found myself downloading a series of lectures on the Founding Fathers from Stanford University and bookmarking the on-line free courses at UCLA Berkley…I listened to a Colonial Williamsburg podcast on Martha Washington and a brief video from Barnes and Noble of Professor Woody Holton on the subject of his new book, Abigail Adams. These short podcasts/vodcasts are helpful to me because they do not require a lengthy time commitment but are still very informative. I think both these pieces would spark the interest of any student interested in learning about the role of women during the revolutionary period of American history.

I was amazed at the number of resources that are out there. I was familiar with UTube as a sourced of learning, in fact, I have been taking on-line lessons on UTube to learn to play the mountain dulcimer. For me, it is much easier to learn a skill by seeing the actual application of the skill, as opposed to simply reading the directions.

As a medium, I am not certain that the ‘webinar’ works for me – although I watched a recording, not a live one which might give a different feeling – unfortunately, my attention span and tendancy to multi-task interfere with a lengthy non-participatory forum.