And so we begin...

Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in my life.  A chance to use my love of technology to further my education in a program that is extremely exciting.  I have enrolled, albeit a little delayed, in my first two classes of the Instructional Technology (MA) program at the University of Northern Iowa.  Go Panthers!


The journey will be long, but enlightening, engaging, and even challenging.  I expect many bumps along the road, and may lose many hours of sleep, but I excited to start this new learning opportunity.  The thought of learning and being able to use numerous types of emerging technologies is going to be excellent!  I love using technology, I love learning about new technology, and I love the idea of being able to improve my teaching craft through the learning that is going to take place in this course.

A couple new (and old) things to start me off... 

A new thing I have learned about is using Adobe Connect.  The first week of class I was unable to get connected with Adobe Connect, which was unfortunate, but after having been a part of this week's Adobe Connect, I can see the benefits of using this tool in an online learning community.  I like the basic platform of Adobe Connect and the capabilities of it.  I look forward to using it for the remainder of these courses and might consider using it in a future classroom, if applicable. 

As a requirement for our class, Dr. Z (@zeitz), asked us to begin using Twitter.  I must say, I have used Twitter quite exclusively (mainly for observing and learning new things) over the course of this past school year, and I wholeheartedly believe in its power as a learning tool.  However, I do not feel like I tweet enough to justify having followers!  My goal over the course of this summer and over the next school year are to tweet more about topics that will benefit my followers.  Also, I can see the power of retweeting information in order to keep an archive of what I have learned about.  I will keep the power of retweeting in mind as I continue to comb through my tweets. 

Blogs, blogs, and more blogs... 

Throughout our course, Dr. Zeitz has also asked us to begin following blogs as another source of learning material.  In the past, I blogged for a short time in a college course (evidence, below, which I plan to delete...) and this past school year have begun following blogs after attending the T.I.C.L 2011 conference and hearing the keynote address by David Warlick.  I was fascinated by the amount of information provided in his address, but also on his blog.  After that conference, I took weekly visits to his blog and continue to follow his blog, today.  

Mr. Warlick's blog was not the only person I wanted to gather new knowledge from during my time in the blogosphere.  I wanted to expand upon the number of blogs I was following as there is a plethora of information out there to learn about!  Have a look, below, at the blogs I am following, and  be sure that you follow this blog MrYtheTechnologyGuy as it will be updated and changed throughout the course of the summer as I learn new things, but also as a tool to be used my students to see the virtual side of Mr. Youngers this coming school year.  Stay tuned for more blogging! 

Blogs I'm following: 
http://drzreflects.blogspot.com/

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/ 
http://www.joebower.org/ 




You, too, can follow all of these bloggers on Twitter.   @zeitz, @warlick, @joe_bower