As you can see from my vary sparse blog entries, I am not doing very well with keeping up with my blogging. As I've mentioned before I hate the idea of blogging, not other people blogging, just me. I guess I'm very antisocial, I don't even use facebook very much. I love the link that Jenni sent me weeks ago (Obvious to You, Amazing to Others) but it hasn't changed my feelings sorry Jenni. However, because this is having an affect on my grades I am going to try harder with it.



This week has been huge with my technological advances as I've been forced to learn new things for assignment 2. I've learnt how to create a nice looking hyperlink (I don't know what the name of its called but I mean when you have a link to a site with just one word for example instead of the whole site address, does that make sense?) on my website and blogspot. I've also learnt how to use a completely new referencing software for me, Zotero. I thought I had Endnote on my laptop but I don't so I had to try the free Zotero download and I was surprised how quickly I picked it up.

For my assignment I used a few different search engines/library databases to research how technology can be used to assist in teaching photosynthesis in the classroom. Each of these are listed below with their own link:

Google Scholar  http://scholar.google.com.au/

Google   https://www.google.com.au/

Findit (on the Murdoch Library page)  http://library.murdoch.edu.au/ 

I actually found Google and Google Scholar to be the most useful for this particular subject search which surprised me as I thought that Findit would be more useful. I found books and conference papers were the hardest to search for with this subject but I had a lot of fun exploring the numerous websites, videos and podcasts that my searches found.

I actually thoroughly enjoyed researching what technology is out there to assist in teaching different subjects in the classroom. I chose photosynthesis as my research topic and I was amazed at the vast amount of resources available. I found so many websites with lots of different resources on them like games and quizzes, lesson plans, study and review notes and games, interactive sites, slideshows & activities and labs. The list is endless and it makes me so excited to think of the possibilities for when I'm teaching and coming up with lesson plans for my own students. So in conclusion: as much as it's like pulling teeth for me to want to sit down and do the work in this unit (nothing personal against technology, I'm the same in my other units), I actually do enjoy playing with new technologies and I am always very proud of myself when I achieve a good outcome and I can definately see how all of this is going to make me a great teacher when Im out in the workforce :)