Final Project Presentations

Today in class we did our final project presentations. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised and happy that I learned a few new things. Blogs seemed to be the topic of choice but it seemed that most people had new and different ideas of how you could utilize them in a classroom. I liked the ideas John mentioned with keeping track of SAE projects over the summer months. Or Maria who talked about sharing experiments and activities with family members and also having students read blogs and respond on current agricultural issues. Jed and Brad made great points about it being motivating to students and mentioning how we could share what our chapters or groups where doing with the community.

Another topic was Smart Boards and I appreciated the power points and content based information that Aaron showed us on the smart technologies web page. Liz also had a great idea in implementing the smart boards that some schools have into community activities such as the counties Quality Assurance Program that is held at the high school. Jeremy had a good presentation on document cameras and pointing out and new and more cost efficient technology. I also loved the pod cast that Courtney's younger sister put together on her SAE, specifically the music choices. Jena discussed flip cams and gave some great reasons for use in a high school agricultural program in helping you to report back to the school board and community on your chapters activities and trips. Gregg mentioned YouTube and I learned about youtube.com/edu which is something I look forward to discussing. Kayla also showed a video that was really interesting in showing us the changes in the way that students are learning and how new technologies can and should be used to help. Kara and Megan both did presentations on Paint.net which was interesting to see how it actually worked for someone in creating a display of sorts. One last project I really enjoyed and would like to mention is Katrina's webpage, this was really neat to see a free web hosting service and how it worked while she was also able to give us an idea of what it took to set up.

Overall I really enjoyed the final project presentations and was glad to learn some new things and get some new ideas for using technology in education.