Summer Class 486

This summer I am taking my last nine hours of coursework before I student teach in the fall. One of the classes I am taking is Instructional Tech 486. (This class is the whole reason I have this blog in the first place, as it is an assignment for the class.) But anyway, for this class we have been working with blogs, wikis, googledocs, and other web-based functions. It has been interesting to see just how these different applications work.

I think my favorite app so far has been the wikis. (Here is the Music Education wiki we have made http://music486sum09.pbworks.com/FrontPage). It is really nice to be able to collaborate with other people on a web-site. A wiki seems to be a very easy way to share information and knowledge with a broad base of people. It is also cool because the people that work on the wiki can continually update it and edit information on the web-site. Formatting a wiki can be a fairly easy task with so many people working on it. It also helps to avoid burnout by one person having to do everything for a web-site.

But the application that I think has the greatest potential is googledocs. I think googledocs can be pushed to include much more than just documents. There could eventually be powerpoint, excel, finale, iphoto, imovie, etc shared and worked on with a format like googledocs. It will be interesting to see if copyright regulations and other applications will allow their files to be shared on google.

Anyway, I still have about seven more weeks in my 486 class, so we'll just have to wait and see what else happens.