The Famous Dr. Ed-Tech

Wow.  I had really looked forward to the summer session thinking that I would actually have MORE time to keep up on classwork, and I wrongly assumed that the coursework would be a little lighter.  Needless to say, this has been very difficult to keep up with since my family has had vacations and reunions planned for the last year.  It has been very hard to keep up with 572 and the 700 classes while jetting around the country.

So, I guess this is just an e-gripe since having duedates every week makes it impossible to actually go take a vacation anywhere and relax while I am gone.  Arghh.  Someday this will all be worth it.

Hi.  My name is Matt Sherwood and I am a technology teacher in Corona, CA.  I am currently earning a master’s degree in Educational Technology at SDSU, hence the title.

I have been teaching for 13 years now in fifth, third, seventh, and eighth grades.  Only the last 3 years have I been strictly teaching technology at the middle school level.  I am loving it. During that time I have been moving from just teaching MS office, to incorporating multimedia into my curriculum.  This has been largely on account of the wonderful free programs available such as Audacity, Paint.net, Photo Story 3, and Windows Movie Maker (not so wonderful, but free and easy).  I branched out into my first podcasting unit this year and created Podcasting101 for my gate class.  I felt it had mixed success and I want to refine it a lot.

You may be wondering about my blog title.  I am actually not a doctor of anything, or famous for that matter, but I earlier made a blog by a similar name for one of my other EdTech classes.  Visit http://thefamousmredtech.blogspot.com to see what I’m talking about.  I started My first blog back in August 2006 for a family website and I still keep my family blog there because I am reluctant to transfer it for fear of loosing all of my four readers in the process.  This is called “From the Mouths of Babes” and can be found at http://sherweb.blogspot.com. Since then, I’ve pumped out various blogs for classes and lessons.  Often they go unused, but I always plan to go back and use them at a later date.  Most recently I created http://writenowsurvey.wordpress.org as a launching point for a district wide student survey.  It worked out quite well.

Anyways, I much prefer the Wordpress “engine” over blogger.  I had already transferred most of my other  blogs to Wordpress.  So needless to say, I am very happy to see an educational rendition of Wordpress and will very likely get some mileage out of it this year in some teacher  inservices I am planning on offering.

Regarding wikis; they kind of are intimidating to me.  I have tinkered with them, but have yet to successfully implement them in any educational manner.  I like Google Sites and Wikispaces seems easy, but I’m not sure how to make them work in a school without rolling out 100’s of passwords.

For a final project, I would like to work out a plan for implementing blogs, podcasts, and wikis in a classroom setting so I can create a teacher-inservice based on my plan.