A Funny Thing Happened With Technology

A Funny Thing

CEP 811 Final Reflection

I have grown so much in these past 8 weeks. There are many ideas and technologies that I have learned that I will definitely bring into the classroom. For example, I learned about StAIR projects, WebQuests, and incorporating UDL into my lesson plans, all of which I will now incorporate into my teaching. I have learned how to incorporate different teaching strategies using technology into my lessons in order to better meet the needs of my students. Furthermore, I learned about voice recordings, like vozMe, that can benefit auditory learners or even nonreaders. I have learned how to embed images on webpages and create visually appealing resources, like my Fraction Fundamentals StAIR project, that support what students have already been learning. I know that I cannot incorporate every learning style and teaching strategy into each lesson, but with the use of technology, I have learned better ways to meet my students needs.

Many of the technologies that I learned were web-based, like the WebQuests and webpages that I created, in addition to all of the UDL resources that Melissa shared with us. There are some great resources on the web, like vozMe, UDL Book Builder, ABCya!, Glogster, and Blabberize. Being aware of these many online tools will help me while lesson planning and deciding which tool will best benefit my students for a particular lesson.

By taking this course along with CEP 810, I am on my way to achieving my personal technology goals. My ultimate goal was to learn about new technologies that I can incorporate into my teaching to better differentiate instruction to meet the needs of my students. The resources that I have learned and created in this class have definitely put me in the right direction. Now that I am familiar with many new technologies, my new goal is to actually implement these in the classroom through my teaching and also to learn MORE! I will utilize some of what I have learned this fall and hope to continue to learn more throughout the remainder of the MAET courses. I am registered to take CEP 812 in the fall and am eager to learn more ways to incorporate technology into my teaching! With more practice and experimentation, I will become more comfortable with using technology in my teaching. This course has increased my excitement of beginning a new school year and continuing on with my own professional development.

Personal Learning Reflection

As an educator, I have grown tremendously from this course. I have learned new technologies such as blogging, RSS readers, social bookmarking, and social networking techniques that I can bring into the classroom. This was possible because of all portions of this course, especially the Explore section where I was able to experience the different technologies firsthand. It was helpful to explore several examples of each technology, for example, both Delicious and Diigo as social bookmarking sites, so I could best decide what would benefit my teaching and my students the most. As stated in my Personal Growth Plan, one of my goals was to better utilize technology in the classroom to further differentiate my instruction. I wanted to make my lessons more interesting and motivating with the use of technology. What I have learned so far in this course, including how to apply the Internet to my teaching, will definitely enable me to do so. In my school, the Internet is at our fingertips so I will have the resources to utilize what I have learned. These technologies open up opportunities to meet the needs of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile learners. Some will work better for certain lessons than others, but it was important to learn about various technologies so I can best decide what works best for which lessons.

The assignment that best exemplifies good teaching with technology is my SIG presentation. I believe that this assignment was beneficial as I collaborated with other teachers and also discovered a new technology to incorporate into my teaching. In my group, I learned how to better incorporate blogs into a classroom setting and how to embed student work, like videos and PowerPoints, onto the blogs. I believe that this is a great tool for teaching because it not only showcases student work and ideas, but allows for comments and collaboration, as well as the opportunity for parents to see their child’s work.

It would have been helpful to create more lessons and activities using different technologies that I can actually use in the classroom, but I know that I will use what I learned in this course to create technology-rich lessons in future courses and on my own. Perhaps if each SIG group created a lesson based on what they learned with their new technology, these lessons could be shared among the class. In this respect, the sharing of lessons using the NETS-S was helpful and provided a vast array of ideas that incorporate technology into the classroom.

I have made progress to my goal of learning new technologies that I can bring into my teaching, however I do not believe that this goal will ever be fully met. Furthermore, I plan to continue my professional development in technology and hope to always learn about different technologies that I can use and adapt to my own classroom. In our society, there will always be advanced versions of software and new medias coming out. I hope to keep up to date with the current technologies that will best meet my students’ needs.

Now after learning about new technologies that can be used in the classroom, my goal is to implement these through my teaching. I want to create technology-rich lessons that utilize what I have learned. I would like to start by utilizing blogs and RSS feeds into my teaching. I will also set up a Diigo page where my students can easily pull up resources and games to support their learning. In order to reach my new goals I will continue to take courses in the MAET program as well as utilize my Personal Learning Network that I began to create during this course. I must take the time to utilize my resources and teach my students how to use certain technologies, like blogs, before involving them in a particular assignment.

I look forward to starting the school year so that I can implement some of what I have learned and continue taking MAET courses to strengthen my knowledge in technology integration.

Online Teaching Experiences

In an elementary setting, I could use the Educational Blog as an online experience with my students. Blogs could be incorporated into any subject area. Students may blog about a book that they just read and comment on books that other students read or even record scientific observations on a blog. Furthermore, students may come up with mathematical story problems while other students solve these problems by commenting. Student writing may be published onto a blog for others to see. Using a blog opens up the doors for collaboration and allows students to showcase their work and ideas. Not only can students comment on each other's ideas, but teachers can comment as well as parents. Since this experience is online, parents can easily view their child's educational ideas and progress.

Teachers should have their own blog where they can model how a book report should look or how a story problem should be formated. This can be a place where students can look for examples and guidelines for different online blog post assignments. Also, a teacher may post a historic scenario, a math problem, a scientific discovery, or even an educational video that students may all comment on. In turn, this may develop an interesting discussion among the whole class.

Since I teach elementary school, I think that some of these online experiences would be difficult to use with my students. For example, a Learning Management System would be very complex for elementary students. I think that students need more practice using individual, basic technologies like Microsoft Office, blogs, and WebQuests before using a management system where many different experiences come together and are all used. This would be better in a high school setting to develop online skills to prepare students for what they may see in college. Also, the Career Planning Tools online experience would be unnecessary in an elementary setting. This type of experience would apply to high school students who are trying to figure out what to do in the future.

Creative Commons

Photo Attribution:

Original image: “Michigan”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aphid00/5917814742/

By: Dave Sizer

http://www.flickr.com/people/aphid00/

Released under an Attribution License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

I may incorporate images like this one into my teaching. This photo is of the coast of Lake Michigan in Michigan. Since I teach 3rd grade and our social studies curriculum focuses on Michigan, this photo would be a suitable image to use to supplement my teaching. Using images from Creative Commons will supplement my teaching and reach my visual learners.

Here is the link to my photo that I licensed with Creative Commons:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/64917590@N04/5910651768/?edited=1

Learning Style

I am a visual learner. I learn best when I can see the information being presented. Graphic organizers and images help me tremendously. For the most part, I kept eye contact with professors and teachers in order to better obtain knowledge. I always took very detailed notes so it was easy for me to go back and review before an exam, project, or paper. If I don't write things down, I do not always remember them. Teachers who present the material using visuals, videos, and handouts best met my learning needs. I did not learn very well from teachers who would just lecture. I would try to take notes, but sometimes it was difficult to keep up and I felt overwhelmed.

It is very difficult to teach every lesson focusing on every learning style. Therefore, teachers need to focus on incorporating different learning styles throughout the lesson instead of sticking with one style throughout the whole thing. For example, the professors that simply lectured for over an hour only met the needs of auditory learners. However, if that professor displayed a few images or a video to supplement what he/she was lecturing about, he/she would meet more students' learning needs. As visuals are displayed, teachers can provide an explanation to meet the needs of both visual and auditory learners. For many concepts, some sort of movement could be done or an object could be explored to introduce the lesson to benefit kinesthetic/tactile learners. There are many ways to incorporate different learning styles into one lesson without using every learning style throughout the whole lesson. The goal is to meet the needs of as many students as possible, who each have different learning styles.

Wiki Lab

I found my school district on Wikipedia. The school that I work at recently went through some changes and the name of the school changed. On the Wikipedia page, the old name of the school "Hollywood Elementary" was listed instead of "Arborwood North Elementary." I edited this text on the page in order to make it current.

Here is a link to the wiki that I created: https://abucska.wikispaces.com/