Throughout the classes that I have taken in the MET program I have read the assigned text, lectures, and links and have gotten excited about new ideas that I could implement in my classroom. Then reality hits and I remember that everything that is in any way related to a blog or forum is blocked on all school computers. This was especially frustrating when going back to school this fall and finding that every project, wiki, blog, etc. that I created over the last 3 months is not accessible to me and my students. Darn those firewalls!Chapter two gave me a lot of new ideas and inspiration to creating new projects and recreating some of the projects or activities that I already do with my students. The bonus is that most of the productivity tools are "the software applications that are commonly found in an office suite" (Pearson, p.30), visualization and multimedia tools, and educational software will not be blocked by the firewall. Yay! I cannot wait to help my students create their stories with PowerPoint this year. Now to find a way to use some of those Internet and communication tools!
I totally found firewalls to be super annoying! There are so many amazing tools to use in the classroom that cannot be accessed because of that. I would like to imagine though if you shared with your school what you were planning to do they could make it available to you!
ReplyDeleteI have had the same issue but I contacted the technology department and they unblocked some specific tools that I use. It was a pain to go through the process but I didn't want to waste all the time I spent in other classes developing projects.
ReplyDeleteLuckily I have a good working relationship with the technology department. I've already talked to them about letting me have access to the sites I have created or coming up with an alternative. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!
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