One last thing...

I have enjoyed the instructional technology class with Dr. Jerles a lot.  Many of the exercises I found useful and some I will use in the classroom.  Exercises with Google earth, webquests, and mailmerge are the ones that come to mind quickly.  I found certain elements of the blog to be redundant, like making 3 different calenders for one.  It was fun to learn about some of those things, but the ones that are most interesting to me I was already doing (Facebook, You Tube, igoogle).  I may have a classroom blog in the future to help parents stay informed about what's happening.  But....at this point in life I don't have time for the rest of it, with 18 hours in the spring and 45 hours of observation facebook will probably just get checked once a week! I enjoyed most of the exercises in class and feel that the things that really relate to classroom use such as powerpoints, mailmerge and grading, and things like that are what should be focused on.  If I use some of the other things in the future like garage band podcast or a flickr account, I would be surprised!  I will use technology in a way that is meaningful to my students learning experience and hopefully I have learned enough to do that.  Thank you.