Brad’s Blog

I recognize that as a result of my Master’s in Educational Technology from APU that I will be considered a tech leader by my school.  As a matter of fact, I have already led a workshop on blogging during an in-service in November.  Most of the teachers in my workshop were at a beginning level in technology.  These teachers were not the type of people who would do the research and devote the time to learn how to create a blog on their own.  However, when the opportunity presented itself for them to attend a workshop where they were able to learn at their own pace, they became very excited about the possibilities.  I was there when they had questions, so they did not get frustrated when something didn’t work right.

As a result of this experience, I learned several important things about teacher readiness to incorporating technology in their classroom.  First, we must give teachers, especially those reluctant to using technology, opportunities to attend technology workshops.  This means giving a priority to technology on in-service days.  We also need to make sure that we offer technology topics that are of interest to the teachers.  The teachers need to be given input into the topics.   There needs to be workshops offered at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels.  In addition, I have discovered that it is extremely important to have follow-up sessions.  Otherwise, the teachers will forget what they have learned.  They need to practice what they learned several times until it becomes second nature.  We have a follow up session for our blogging workshop scheduled for our first day back in January.

I am looking forward to helping our school move forward in the process of incorporating technology into classroom instruction.

I decided to research the ministry organization of Max Lucado. He is the senior minister at Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas. He is most well known as an award-winning author of more than 60 books including over 30 children and youth books. I have read several of his books and so I began to look at ways that his ministry is using technology to reach people more effectively.

First is his website, maxlucado.com. You can subscribe to free weekly email devolutionals, which I have done, that are very inspirational. 32 video podcasts are available on his website and are also available through iTunes. I have watched a few of these podcasts and they are very high quality. The website has many resources available that are too numerous to mention. Other notable resources availabe on the website include eCards, daily audio messages, weekly text messages in PDF form, and excerpts from his many books. All of these resources are free. He does have CDs of his sermons available for a subsription fee.

All of these resources are effective tools to reach out to people who cannot hear him in person. No longer are ministry organizations bound by the geographical limitations of the past or constrained by TV and radio as the only means of mass media ministry. Now people can have access to much more information whenever they want to access it. It is a highly effective way to reach people with the message of Jesus. I have found these ministry resources to be inspirational and even life-changing. I would highly recommend the Max Lucado website and ministry resources to anyone.

Here are some pictures from our family vacation in Las Vegas in June.

Enjoying a meal at Margaritaville.                      Inside Hoover Dam.

Outside Hoover Dam.                                      Waterfalls at Flamingo Hotel.

Here is a link to my first attempt at a podcast.

http://www.gcast.com/u/bhenegar/main

Welcome to my first attempt at a blog. I am very excited as I begin my M.A. in Educational Technology and Learning at APU. I am actually in my second term of the program. So far I am very impressed with the APU Master’s program. The thing that I like the most about the program is the emphasis on developing unit plans and projects that I will actually use in my classroom. I have taken many courses over the years that have been long on theory and short on practical application. In the EDUC 512 class I developed a unit plan on Series and Parallel Electrical Circuits that I will use next year in my Physics classes. In the EDUC 511 class I learned how to use Adobe Acrobat to produce dynamic documents for my classroom. I am still thinking about specific uses of Acrobat in my classes next year. During the summer term I am enrolled in two courses: EDUC 515 Evolving Educational Technologies, the course where I am now learning about creating blogs, and EDUC 527 Photoshop. The purpose of this blog is to record the progress of my journey over the next year. I am off to a great start!