What I
accomplished in the course, Understanding the Impact of Technology on
Education, Work, and Society is initially different then what I thought I was
going to accomplish. In this reflection
I will be focusing on a few different questions.
First, this course has helped me develop my
own technology skills as a professional teacher. In these past seven weeks, I have explored a
few new technology skills that I have heard of but never really took the intuitive
to explore and learn how to use until now. I have
enjoyed this course as I learned how to use a few different tools, such as how
to set up blogs, podcasts and wikis, and I have learned ways on how educators
could use these strategies in a classroom.
In my county, blogs and wikis are not approved to be used. However, I do use a website called EDMODO,
which is like Facebook but it is a social network for school that I posted about
back in September.
Secondly,
my knowledge has deepened for teaching and the learning process. My eyes have opened and I have come to learn
the importance of meeting my students’ needs and interests as I plan my lessons
to ensure their success in learning the material.
I feel it is important that teachers continually learn and stay up-to-date with the new technologies, so we can help our students learn these new
skills.
Next, I
have always been an advocate for a learner-centered environment. I believe it is important to be a facilitator
and guide students to be active learners.
If learning activities are structured to support student-to-student
interactions or group interactions then students are required to explain
concepts and contribute to the work.
That being said, this environment gives me the opportunity to gauge what
my students have learned as they work with partners or in groups.
Furthermore
I will continue to expand my knowledge of learning, teaching and leading with
technology with the aim of increasing student achievement. I will continue to explore, learn and stay
up-to-date with the new technologies to help my student’s intellectual
growth. I will continually self-reflect and
be part of the educational social network.
Another
thing this course has allowed me to do is set two long-term goals to transform
my classroom environment. My first goal
is to create audio podcasts, and learn to create video podcasts as well. Within
the next two years, I hope to incorporate these simple podcasts with my
elementary students. I would like to
start with a simple video direction that students can watch as they accomplish
a task. The second goal I have
established is to try to get all the elementary teachers to use EDMODO in their
classroom, and help guide students how to use this as a reflection
journal. I am going to continue to help
train our teachers with a few different technology skills. During professional developments, I have the
opportunity to show expose my colleagues to different technological skills that
they can use to make things easier for not only planning but teaching the
students. This past professional
development, I demonstrated to a group of teachers how to use MS Excel and how
to use PowerPoint.
Finally, in
completing this course, my knowledge on blogs, wikis and podcasts have evolved. I have not mastered this new knowledge, but
this course has led me in the right direction.
I am moving forward and learning new technology skills that I can
introduce to my students to engage them in learning!
Watch out world as I get more tech savvy, which will benefit my students! This is officially my first audio podcast! I found that using the Audacity player to record, then exporting my recording as MP3 so I could use Podbean to create my podcast was very easy to use once I did some reading. It was also simple to embed the code into my blog space, so I could share this with everyone! I think the sound quality would improve if I invest in a headset microphone! I was going to put in some instrumental music from the ccmixter.org website, however, it kept breaking my words up as I was talking. This is something that I will need to work on to improve. Does anyone know if it would it be better to put the music in first and then talk over the music?