I definitely feel that what I learned is relevant to what I am doing in school right now. I do not see how it could not be. With the way today's society is going any coursework that emphasizes technology use in the school is going to be practical knowledge that any educator would want to take advantage of. I am actually using ideas from the readings to change my approach to using technology in the classroom. For example, I now allow my students more random access to assignments rather than me leading them through step by step. This alone has increased student engagement in my classroom tenfold.
As far as outcomes I did not achieve were differing ideas and strategies for how to use technology for course-specific instruction. I would have liked to have seen more of that. I am admittedly not the most creative person in the world, and I feel like if I could have been given more course-specific technology integrated strategies that I could use in my own classroom that I would have benefitted even more from this course. That is really it in terms of what I did not achieve in this course. I feel that if I could have achieved this then I could have collaborated with my colleagues to give them ideas as well that they could try out in their own classrooms and courses.
For the most part I was successful in carrying out my course assignments. The majority of the assignments were very straightforward and I knew what was expected of me. The only thing that threw me off was what was expected during the week three assignment. I would have liked to have seen more modeling of this particular assignment. Thankfully I had other teachers in my district enrolled in the same course, and we put our heads together to try and dissect exactly what it was that we were supposed to do. Perhaps it was even planned to make that assignment vague to increase the need for collaboration among our peers. If that is what the plan was the it worked.
The biggest thing I learned about myself is that I am not as "with it" as I thought I was. I did not realize how easy it is to publish things on the internet, as well as learning all of the terminology. Even this blog for example, before this course I thought a person had to be a computer guru to create a blog. I quickly learned that it is really quite simple and that I was able to do it in about five minutes with the little tech savvy that I have. I still keep an open attitude toward technology integration. As educators we cannot hide from technology in the classroom, we need to embrace it if we are to be successful in getting through to our students in the 21st century.
Blogs can be a great resource for education as we head into the 21st century. That is another thing that I have learned from this course. Heading into next school year, I am going to start out by creating a blog as a tool to communicate with parents about upcoming assignments and tests. I would also like to create a blog where my students can collaborate with one another on assignments that I have given. I feel that using this as a tool will increase learner engagement as well as improving scores. I understand that technology use does not always work the first time, but give me a short trial by fire period, and I feel like I can figure it out.
My biggest concern with blogs and blogging in education is safety. This course opened my eyes to the problem of cyber bullying and online predators. I would want to shelter my students from this as much as possible. I feel I could do this if I could use my blogging site behind some type of district firewall. Then the problem would become accessibility. Not all of my students have access to the internet when they leave school. I would not want to put them at a disadvantage because of something that they have no control over. As big of a tool as blogging could be, there are still several problems that could hinder it from reaching its potential.
As stated before I am going to start out next school year by communicating with my stakeholders through a blog. I will use this blog to post upcoming assignments, tests, and quizzes. I would also like to set up an open forum type of discussion board that I could check to get a feel for the concerns that parents might have. As an administrator I could use this same open forum concept to test the waters on a new initiative to get a feel for what the faculty feels about an upcoming change. The positives to using technology are endless, we just need to find a way to get around the barriers that are preventing full technology integration in our classrooms.
