Why EDHI 9040?

I’m taking EDHI 9040 this semester because I’m eager to learn about new resources to use in my classroom and opportunities for incorporating them into my class meetings. I’ve been teaching Public Speaking for the last four years that I’ve been in graduate school, and so often I only use the same four resources: Blackboard, YouTube and AmericanRhetoric.com for speech videos/texts, and PowerPoint to talk about effective visual aids.

I know that there are more resources on-line and even on the different course management systems that I use that I could be taking advantage of. But I don’t know exactly what those are. Once I can learn more about them, I’d also like to be able to incorporate them into sample teaching activities and receive feedback on them from other people. This way I can be sure that the activities are user-friendly and free of kinks when I do finally bring them into my classroom.

When I think back to my own undergraduate coursework, I can identify few times when we used technology resources outside of tools on Blackboard, PowerPoint, and maybe a few websites. And I don’t think that I suffered as a student as a result. I want to avoid using technology in the classroom as a form of entertainment for students who might see these resources a means of making the course more exciting and use it instead to create new activities to help my students understand and apply the course material, and maybe make some of my old activities more efficient.