My Second ILEP Tech Seminar

Monday was the day I had always waited because every monday we were scheduled to have the Technology Seminar with Tom Rosenberger and Drey Martone. This time we have brought our own laptops. Lizia, Wheber and Connie decided to buy an Apple Macbook while I, Berney, Raafat, Walid and others bought Laptop windows 8. My choice was on the Lenovo Ideapad U430 Ultrabook Touch Screen that I bought at Best Buy for $ 840. I was so excited to learn about technology with Tom and Drey.

connie and lizia Macbook pro

My Lennie

The class began at 9:30 am with an overview of that day’s agenda explained by Tom. He started by explaining the differences between Macbook and Windows laptop. While distributed handouts, Tom with his assistant first explained about the use of the Macbook because three of our friends bought Macbook. It is quite easy because the Macbook is also user friendly. We could figure out how to use a Macbook.

Furthermore, Tom described how to use Windows 8. It was rather confusing at the beginning because the interface is rather different from the previous series of windows. Fortunately, I used to operate a smartphone full of tiles like that so thankfully it was not too difficult for me. Earlier I also have learned from video tutorials on YouTube on how to operate Windows 8.

Next, we were given an explanation about the use of social media in particular how to create a blog. Practice was done by creating a blog directly from Gmail namely Blogger. Since I already have a blog on WordPress then I asked Tom to be able to resume my old blog instead of create a new one. Then we were taught how to make a post and how to link the blog so we can send our blogs’ link via email to Tom and Drey as an assignment. After understanding how to create a blog then the class was taken over by Drey. She described how to find resources on the internet for the educational purpose. Learning resources are wide spread on the internet, and we were taught how to look for an educational blog which will benefit us as teaching materials/resources. We were also taught to make a twitter account and how to use them. I was lucky because I am an active user of twitter although I was not specifically intended my twitter account for educational purpose. On twitter there is a lot of discussion or conversation about education and a lot of links to a blog about education. Our next assignment was to find blogs that are related to education, and we found it easily.

Drey’s twitter

Finally, 1.5 hours had passed and at the end of the day we understood a lot of things and the most important thing was we got our blog ready! The assignment for this session was a new blog post and send the link of our blog via email to Tom and Drey. And here it is … hopefully it is not too bad. Thanks guys!

Me and Berney