Well the best place to start...

...is the beginning. To begin I would like to introduce myself. I am a first year Education student at Brandon University and have decided to write this blog as an assignment for a course this term. My name is Elizabeth and I hope that this is all going to work right for me, since at the moment, I am not the most tech. savvy person in the world. As I have said this is my first year in my Education Degree, after I have already graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, with a history major and a math minor. The idea behind this blog is to have me try out different pieces of technology, in and out of class, and then blog about it. I want this blog to look at all the different technology I try and find practical uses for it, for both students and teachers, since if technology is being used in a class, it should be used with a purpose, not just used at random.
We have just a had a week of class, but already have discussed one very interesting website that could very useful to teachers. The website is called wordle.net and it allows people to create word splashes using the internet. This doesn't sound like much, but teachers like word splashes, as they can be used to brainstorm ideas, introduce a new unit, or in the case of online ones analyze poetry or other literature. The poetry or literature analysis is done by the website itself, as the word that occurs the most in the original text is larger than all the others in the word splash and usually that word is related to the theme of the piece. The website allows you to play with the image, changing the colour, shape, font or even the language. The images created by wordle can be printed directly, saved as a PDF. There are other websites that allow you to create word splashes, and they all have different features and abilities.
Finally, another piece of technology that I am getting addicted to is Google Plus. It is like Facebook, but is owned by Google, and it is a ton of fun for me. Lots of TV shows and interest groups have Google Plus accounts, so you can find out lots of different information on it. I am currently following an awesome one called Interior Design that has lots of different and unique ideas. Google Plus also has pictures from all over the world, photos that a teacher could use as examples in a photography class, an English Language Arts teacher could use the phots to start a creative writing piece, or science and geography teachers could add them to a powerpoint or lecture.
To conclude, I hope people will find some of the information I post in this blog interesting, and maybe people will learn something or be encouraged to try something new.