Final entry. Or is it?

As the saying goes, you can't put toothpaste back into the tube. While this happens to be the last entry for the 23 Things project, it certainly is not the last time that I will be using this blog for my educational studies and career. Far too much value has been created, shared and discussed to merely leave this outstanding experience and foundation behind. As teachers-to-be, we can thrive on the experience of exploring emerging technology together and by ourselves. We may not be in the same room together, as it were, but we are a like-minded community who share a passion, and one of the greatest assets of this assignment has been the discovery of what can make us effective teachers by doing the project together.

I'd like to thank Dr. Wall for providing us with a terrific platform for exploration and creativity ideas. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I was familiar with this project before I began it through my connections with other fellow APSU education students over the last few years. But I had no idea of the depth and personal results that would come from diving into the details of the work over the last month.

I came away with four core elements within the assignment that will assist me, now and in the future: organizational management; research/project ideas, distance-based learning and lesson planning. They all worked together to formulate a non-linear series of instruments, some of which I found more practical and useful for teachers (flow charts, wikis, social bookmarking, ) than others (Google, Flickr). What was so striking to me as I progressed through the project was the fact that it behooves us as future teachers to be on the ball with 2.0 resources as a whole. It isn't a matter of "when" or "if" the technology will be used but "how". Simply put, our success will be based on how we introduce, fashion and implement the tools that were explored in this assignment. Our students will depend on it, and so will our tenure as teachers.

As a History teacher in the making, the 23 Things project reinforced and emphasized my firm understanding that contemporary technology has a secure place in teaching my specialized curriculum that is based on the past. It will not only make teaching the subject more effective, but more fun, interactive, engaging and worthwhile for myself and students. History doesn't have to put kids to sleep. It needs to wake them up in ways that make a difference for a lifetime. This assignment gave me the mechanisms, ideas and confidence to bring that understanding to my future classroom