Tools Module
"The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved” by Todd Oppenheimer gave me an opposing viewpoint to my positive view about technology.  This article expressed the author’s negative views about the use of computers in schools.  He started out by discussing a PowerPoint presentation that lacked substantial information but had excellent graphics.  The teacher of that class said this was a building block, and seemed more focused on the use of technology than the students learning the material that they made their presentations about.  I felt that the author really believed in his argument and must have observed some poor uses of technology.  I enjoyed using the various software programs in this module.  I already knew how to use MS Excel and MS PowerPoint, so that part was relatively easy.  However, I never used Inspiration before, and was not sure how long it would take to learn how to use the software for the assignment.  Thankfully, I found the tutorial to be very good and found Inspiration to be relatively easy to use and user friendly.  I even decided to base my lesson in the Tools module on the Inspiration software.  Although it is used to design graphic organizers, the resulting charts looked almost like computer flow charts to me.  Prior to using this module, I thought that PowerPoint was a good tool for teachers to use since they can make presentations for their classes.  However, I did not consider that students could make PowerPoint presentations as projects.  I think that is an excellent idea, especially for science classes.  Real scientists have to present their ideas to others, and the students could learn to do so by putting together PowerPoint presentations about their science fair projects, or even about some of the lab reports.