Blogging Down My Thoughts

I came home today from school only to find that my electricity was out.  It finally came back at 2 in the morning, and now I have my chance to blog...  Today turned out to be a harsh epiphany that I've tucked so far away from my consciousness that it took 8 hours of no electricity for me to find within myself again.  Maybe this previous sentence was gobbledygook, but I never said I was a good writer.

No Electricity:  I thought to myself, let's get busy and do some homework.  Then I realized that I needed the internet for all of my courses, so that's a no-go.  Then I figured I can do some chores.  But the chores that I needed done also depended on electricity... So I ended up being extremely lazy for about 8 hours.  The time spent without electricity reminded me of what I always thought was most important: survival skills.  I vowed to myself in my early twenties that I wanted to learn how to grow my own food, create my own necessities, and know how to survive in the wild-- we can't always rely on technology for the rest of our lives, can we?

Web 2.0:  I've become a bit bored talking about my "home blackout" ordeal (it's been on my mind all day), so I'd like to move on and touch base with the web 2.0 tools I've learned about for the past couple of weeks.  I must admit that none of the websites would benefit me in teaching my future math students.  On the up side, I must admit that they are all fun to fool around with.  Sometimes I wonder if math is best taught and learned through the "whiteboard" process and cooperative group learning...

Inspiration:  Inspiration is such a fun and great concept mapping tool.  But it was totally uninspiring when it comes to the mathematics field.  Now is my chance to complain about a software program.  First, Inspiration does not allow me to enter in formal math equations, which makes it hard to want to use it for math in the first place.  Secondly, The program does not allow multiple font justifications within one box (i.e. If you "center" your first sentence, you cannot align your next sentence to the left or right within that same box).  Finally, Inspiration had absolutely no way of putting in math functions.... I know I said that already, but this was the most frustrating part.  I worked so long and hard on this project that there is no doubt I'm proud of it and that I will show it to my future students.  Frankly, I was excited to use Inspiration, but I'm not sure if I would ever use this again... The future of this program is to hopefully focus on more possibilities for math teachers to use it -- I mean, we matter too:)