 Hey, my name is Jennifer Gonzalez and I work full-time to help teachers do their jobs better. I have a website called Cult of Pedagogy and on that site I talk about all kinds of things but one of the things that is a passion of mine is helping teachers get better at using technology. And one of the things I've been working on for the last couple of months is a course, an online course that is called Jumpstart. The goal of this course is to give teachers hands-on practice with the technology that is going to make the biggest difference in their classrooms. When I was trying to decide which tools to teach in this course, I realized that asking which tools was actually the wrong question. What I needed to be thinking about is what processes you need to learn. What are the uses of technology that are going to make the biggest difference for you? So instead of focusing on tools, I decided to build the course around processes. These are the things that you would do with the technology in the classroom because for every process there are lots of different tools that will do that. For example, the first process we do is blogging. Blogging is a really versatile classroom tool. You can have teacher blogs, you can have student blogs, you can use a blogging tool to actually create a website that isn't even a blog. So module one, we just learn a little bit about how the process of blogging works, how you can apply it in a lot of different ways in the classroom and then I get you started on one blogging tool and you set up a basic blog. All of the modules work like that. You understand the process first, how you can apply it in the classroom and then we practice it with one hands-on project using just one tool. And I give you a list of other tools that can work similarly to that one. But the idea here isn't for you to try all the tools. The idea is understand the process, see how it works in the classroom and then try it with one tool. The hands-on projects are really, really key. It's one thing to sort of have an idea of how it works, but until you actually try it, hit some bumps and figure some things out. You don't really understand how to use the tool and it may be harder for you to help your students use it too. It's also such a good way to build confidence because once you've tried one and had some success with that, then you are kind of excited to try another one. And then when you have a little success with that, then you're excited to try that the next one. That's what I really want for you. I want you to build your confidence and feel like you can make smart, thoughtful decisions about how to use the technology in your classroom. So the course has a few different parts. You have a manual that walks you through all of the lessons and gives you your project assignment and has some reading and then for every module, there are videos that actually teach you step-by-step how to do the project. And I have done all of the projects ahead of time. I've created my own sample blog where I've actually worked through all of these projects so that you can see what they look like at the end. Just like with our students, it helps if we create a model of what the product should look like at the end. So I've done the same thing for this course, just giving you an idea of what things should look like. I know that this course is going to put you in a really good, comfortable, confident, competent place with technology. So for more information, just go to teachersguide2tech.com and click on the course and you will get all the information you need.