The World Through Panoramic Glasses

As the first semester of T.E.A.M. comes to a close, I am thinking about how it has changed me. Notice that I said "change" because change can be good or bad. It just means that the way I was before might be different than the way I am now.
I am no newbie to technology, and I identify myself as a moderately proficient user. I love new tools, and I can usually find my way around using simply by 'playing' with them. You can imagine how I was a bit skeptical about the T.E.A.M. program as far as technology goes.
At almost the conclusion of semester one, I find myself immersed in a learning environment that allows me to grow at my own pace. We do reach out to others in the program - students and mentors alike without fear of consequences. I have taken my 5 workshops now. Some were better than others, but they were all applicable.
In my classroom, tomorrow will be the culmination of over a month's work. For American Education Week, we are inviting our families in to view our Crayfish Vodcast Project, affectionately called "The CrayCast". It was an inquiry based project with students working independently and collaboratively. They were assigned characteristics to research and used resources such as their observation notes, the Internet for content and images, and non-fiction literature. They then used Microsoft Photo Story to collaboratively create movies based on that research, and they applied narration audio that they had written and record themselves. They blogged about it. They talked about it. They wrote about it. They were excited about it, and so was I. I took a Flash workshop last weekend, and I used Flash to create two movies for it. One is the opening credits (that I am especially proud of since I always found Flash to be cumbersome), and then a nice simple movie with scrolling closing credits. I will finish it off with a game of Millionaire to make sure that our parents were paying attention (but mostly just to have a little more fun).
The purpose of this entry is not to brag, because I simply can't stand that crap. I need to give credit where credit is due. First of all, some of it goes to my students that had the creative energy and enthusiasm to embark on this project with me.
That being said, most of the thanks goes to T.E.A.M. This program has given me the panoramic glasses mentioned in the title. Seeing the wider, bigger picture is what it is all about. Technology was only a part of our project. It was the vehicle through which the project was presented, but it was not the sole force or resource used. Technology did not change how or what I taught, but rather it extended and enhanced it. Direct instruction would surely have been easier to teach the concepts that they explored, but at what costs? Convenience vs. Constructivism I guess, right Prof. Dornisch?