Jeff+Laake



__Description__ Hello, my name is Jeff Laake; I was born in raised in northern Kentucky and currently live there with my wife Amanda (pictured with me above). After high school, I went to college and graduated with degrees in economics and history. Afterwards, I got a job working for the Woodford County Economcial Development Authority in Versailles, KY and then moved back to Northern Kentucky to work for Fidelity Investments. During this time, Amanda and I got married and moved to Burlington, KY. After a while, I realized that I did not enjoy my profession and decided to make a change. In this manner, I enrolled at UC in order to become a high school social studies teacher. For the last year and a half, I have been taking classes at UC and at the end of December finished my student teaching at Milford high school. In this regard, I have continued on at UC in order to get my masters degree.

__Hope__ My hope for this class is to become comfortable with many of the technologies that are out there and to deteremine effective ways to include technology into my lessons. I am always looking for ways to improve my instruction, and I believe this class can help me do this.

__Image of what educational technology means__

To me, educational technology is a tool that one can use to connect with students which allows one to present material in many different and creative forms. The end goal of using technology in the classroom is to help the students understand the material and to develop higher levels of cognitive thought. In this manner, this is why I chose this picture; it illustrates the end goal of using technology in the classroom (ie the lightbulb is supposed to go off in the student's head when one effectively uses technology). If one can successfully intergrate technology into one's lessons, then the students will benefit.

__Educational Blog__ Here is a link to an educational blog that I found to be interesting: [|http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/blogs/index.html#tech] I chose this specific blog, due to the fact that it had a wide variety of contributers to it and it covered a vast amount of different topics.