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I felt that this class was very valuable to me overall. Most of the topics we covered were not entirely new to me--in fact, many of the ideas in the assignments I submitted have been recurring topics in my teaching life for many years. However, while I was aware that there were many online resources for teaching, I had never really taken the time to find out more about them, or even try to use them for myself. This class made me both aware of their existence, and gave me the opportunity to experiment with many of them.
Overall, I believe that the Google+ experience was the best part of the course. I have taught online classes using several different platforms, but I found that creating opportunities for student interaction was clunky at best, depending primarily on standard discussion boards. Most students in my classes feel that discussion board interactions are too forced, and they are not overly thrilled with having to read through their classmates' posts to reply. While there is a real learning curve for Google+, once the learner has discovered all of the nooks and crannies there, interaction is much more fluid and life-like. The fact that Hangouts is built-in also makes it much easier to interact in real time.
I also like the Blogger platform as a way of sharing individual thoughts. I like how easy it is to share the posts with only specific groups of people, without having to make the posts completely public.
As for the non-Google tools we used, I tried many that didn't actually get used for an assignment for the class. I spent a lot of time experimenting with different tools--especially trying to find an alternative to Xtranormal. While I felt that I learned a lot from the time I spent experimenting, it sometimes meant that I didn't have the time to actually complete the assignment, so some of the assignments I actually submitted were probably not as good as they could have been if I had used only one tool from the start. I am aware that the due dates were not strict for the class itself, but I was teaching a full load of classes (five!) at the same time, and I felt that it was better to keep moving along than to get stuck somewhere and get behind.
Moving forward, I am sure that many of the things I learned in this class will be incorporated into classes that I design and/or teach in the future. In some cases, it may be simply creating videos to explain a specific idea to students. In most cases, though, I am more likely to have my students use these tools as part of a learning process.
I also feel that I benefited from seeing other students' creations for the class. Because of time constraints on my part, I'm afraid that I focused mainly on those submitted by my small group members, but I did try to view other students' posts as my time permitted, although I certainly did not reply to everything I read and watched. I am a strong believer in the idea that we learn more from our peers than we do from our teachers, and this class was well designed to that end.
