New look in many Google apps!

Times they are a changin'...

Remember in class when we discussed that Google will be changing interfaces (the appearance of their web sites and controls?

Google is already offering new interfaces for many of there apps. You'll notice a 'Try the updated Blogger interface' link on the top of you dashboard.

Google IG, Google Groups just announced a change today...

Likely the 'try this out feature' will soon be replaced by a 'we'll be switching you over soon to th new interface. Switch now, or we'll do it for you later.'

The new interfaces will be more streamlined... and hard to navigate at first. Be patient, read what's on the screen, and take educated guesses about what you need to click on to accomplish your goals.

Hope everyone's doing well and enjoying the start to the school year.

We had a rough start to our school year courtesy of Hurricane Irene! Here's a post on what happened up here and the road to recovery.

Looking forward to seeing you folks again!  Adam

Summer Tech

Hi all! 

My reflection on this course is the following. We are catalogued as digital immigrants. When we where born we didn't have computers (at least not personal computers), we didn't even have cellphones. Some of us where already teenagers when technology started to show up in our lives and some where already working as teachers when this started. Technology hasn't been growing slowly, but in an exponential rate that sometimes can be overwhelming to think about. 

In my case, it's my line of work and I really like technology and I try to understand it as much as possible, but I was very happy to see during our class with Adam that a lot of people who had been having a lot of trouble with technology before, where feeling more and more comfortable with it. I have been teaching a course on blogs for two years now at school where some people from our class has taken the course twice and didn't get to the point they got during that week! Of course, the course @ school is always very limited in time and during this week everyone got to have a whole week to work on something that was very important or interesting to them. The greatest lesson: you're not going to break the computer if you click on everything to figure out how to do different things.

I had a lot of fun in this class and I hope we can all keep in touch. Thanks for the great week and I will miss you all a lot.

Ari :)

Summer and technology

Hello Adam:

I wanted to participate on this blog as a contribution to this class, as a teacher technology has been a great help in my classes as a matter of fact part of our action research includes a part where we compare and contrast our practice before and after using technology and let me say it has been a huge difference and now we include technology on a daily basis in our classes. Changing the subject a little bit let me thank you for the support and patience, my mother is doing much better and hopefully soon she will add her comments as well......hope to see you some other time.

Best Regards

Elisa Berardi

Reflection

Since the beginning of the course, I thought it will be very fun to learn new things about technology. I was scared when we decided to do do a blog, because I had never done this, but I knew everything was going to be ok because we had Adam's and peer's help.

I really liked our final project because trying out every single option, we created a very cool blog for our student's and parents. I was amazed when we were able to add twitter comments to it and to realize how easy it was.

I also enjoyed to see what my peers made. I learned a little bit about all the different projects they made. After looking at them, I wanted to learn to do all those things and I fell in love with macs and now I have my own and I can't wait to start doing many different things with it :)

Thank you for everything Adam. I hope you had a wonderful time here at Monterrey and that you enjoyed those delicious "chilaquiles" :)

REFLECTION

Hi ! Adam Elisa (lisa.brd@gmail.com) wants to send you a post, can you send her an invitation.

Thanks.

My Summer Tech Reflection

I was really happy in this tech course. I had the opportunity to try out new things such as the mac notebook and the i pad. It was wonderful having this type of course because it allowed you tofreely explore this tools and focus on what ever was important or interestiong for each of us. I felt really proud of my self when I saw the outcomes. I think that it would have been great to have written down the steps that I went through to do each of my creations in order to go over them later on when using them again. It would also be useful to keep on using this gadgets in order to remember how to do the things I learned. If I stop practicing I'll just forget everything!!
Thank you Adam for sharing with us, for being so patient and for sharing your passion with us. I really loved the video of the orchestra from Venezulea, it was very inspiring. I hope you enjoyed our city and our food. Thanks again for everything!!

REFLECTION

I think it was wonderful that our last Master's course was a technology one. I don't know if it was planned that way or if it was a coincidence. Whatever it was, it was very useful, at least for me, to have this class now because of all the technology we are now using in our lives and in the classroom and because we could learn many different things to use in our upcoming Capstone Presentation.

My team and I decided to learn how to further use iMovie and to create a small video that we will use in the Capstone Presentation. We learned other useful things as well, such as: use twitter, create blogs and wikis.

Now that it's almost back to school day, I'm starting to create a blog that I can use with my students and with their parents.

The technology course was extremely useful for me, and I loved the way it was taught. It was taught the way we are supposed to teach our students, with freedom to explore, instead of dictating them step by step what they need to do. For this course, I think the teaching method you chose was the best one you could choose.

Thank you Adam for everything and I hope to see you again soon.

Adriana Leal Lankenau