Sweet World of Joan

I wanted to celebrate my 10th year of teaching with a bang. I did not intend to have a career in teaching; I did not know I have the “calling”. Maybe it was already there but I did not recognize it. I was very active in High School, a girl scout and a Red Cross volunteer I practically spent three years teaching about scouting and first aid. But I am quite in the classroom. I took my college years seriously concentrated in my studies and did not join any extra curricular activities, very opposite of my high school life. Maybe that is why I forgot about teaching, that it comes naturally for me, that I was trained to teach during my years in high school. It was my dream to share what I know specially about IT, the Internet, blogging and now social networking but I found it hard to have a venue to share my knowledge, others I tried sharing how to blog felt insulted and view me as a show off. I just want them to enjoy what I do and reap from the benefits of these technologies. Last month I ...

This is my tenth year of teaching in college. I started teaching in PUP in 1998 where my students was just a two years younger than me. I teach computer engineering subjects then. I was invited by my former department head Engr. Rafael Oquindo to teach in my alma mater PUP. I was a computer programmer/developer before I started teaching in PUP but as part of my work I also train newly hired programmer trainees in our company and had been a resource person on Information Technology on several seminars before teaching in PUP. I guess I have the calling/passion for teaching. I love teaching, when I teach I forget everything, my problems, my worries and everything else in between. What matters are the lessons I would like my students to learn. What I would like to achieve now in teaching is to teach senior citizens, or adults who don’t believe that they can still learn to operate computers and I would like them to enjoy the benefits of the Internet. Maybe even teaching kids about computer...

My class in Introduction to Information and Technology have this blogging project, I gave them 5 blog post assignment(one post per week) with specific topics that will end this semester. It is not compulsory, it is to be their final project I let them choose between blogging or the traditional 30-paged term paper about how to earn money online. My students are freshmen BSBA students so the topic on the research is interesting/beneficial to them. Its been a very long and tiring week on keeping tabs on each of them as they create their blogs. One of our difficulties was there is no computer laboratory at PLMAR that has internet connection, so our communication during this writing project is thru text messaging, yahoo messenger, email and friendster. After a few sleepless nights checking and linking blogs to my tech site the digitized youth , which I made specially for my students in mind, I now have the pleasure of reading their blogs (and of course grading them). It is only the second ...

It is my third semester to teach my students about blogging. I started it last year with my computer engineering students in PUP as an additional topic and to my civil engineering and AB History students in the Intro to IT subject. I did not found it hard to teach the topic for most of the students regularly surfs the net and knows the ins and out, specially email, egroups and friendster and they are on their 3rd to 4th year in college. Some of the already have blogs and almost everyone wants to have their own blogs. We just discuss the basics like how to get started, where to get the free site and how to maintain their blogs plus what to blog about and what not to, and the students do the rest with minimal supervision from me. Then I regularly visit their blogs for additional extra points on their final grade and its not compulsory. This semester is quite different from the previous ones, I teach Intro to Information Technology at PLMAR (Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Marikina), to freshmen...