#8 PowerPoint

A technology I believe could help out in classes immensely would be Augmented Reality. It has already gone through small scale testing within schools. It helps accomplish experiments in chemistry that would otherwise be to dangerous to do in the classroom. You wouldn't want untrained students handling dangerous chemicals that could potentially harm students. In geometry it allows students to view 3-D shapes and manipulate them as well. I think that it could be use to show classes different parts of the world, and look around those places. This application would be useful in classes such as geography. Giving students the ability to explore far away places could spark a new interest in classes.


The technological divide is defined as the generation that grew up with technology, and the generation that did not. That divide is what separates technology natives, like myself, from non-technology natives. I am on the side of the divide that has grown up with technology. This is because since I was born technology has been anywhere I looked. The digital divide will affect the future of classrooms, because the more that technology develops the more classrooms will change. Technologies will continuously be introduced into the world and it is one of the responsibilities of future teachers to keep up with those technologies so they don't fall behind. If a teacher of my generation falls behind on the technology then being a teacher is going to become very difficult for them. In order to address this change in classrooms, I would make it a priority of mine to keep up to date on the latest technologies being released, by either testing them out or reading about them in the news. This would allow me to effectively use them in the classroom.


The new skills I learned from the PowerPoint project, was the different ways that you are capable of actually editing the slides themselves. I didn't know about the master slide function and that would have been very useful to know about in the past PowerPoint slides I have developed. Being able to create a custom slide design is also very helpful. What I liked about the project was that it allowed me to explore the various functions of PowerPoint. That being said the part I hated the most was actually finding the tools I needed to use in PowerPoint. The tool bar itself is very cluttered and ever new update to the program always changes things around somehow, which makes memorizing the tool bar hard to accomplish. I could improve upon this presentation next time by including more images that describe what I will be talking about, rather then using bullet points. This assignment would prove useful in a classroom scenario such as a teacher needing a substitute. The teacher could create the PowerPoint and record him speaking so the students could continue on with the lesson. By including teacher notes on the slides, the substitute would be provided with the directions needed to teach the class.