810 Personal Learning Reflection

CEP 810 has helped me consider the role technology plays (or can play) in education, and that it has now become the responsibility of the teacher to prepare students to be successful in the digital world. Though the premise of this course is educational technology, I also learned that even though technologies are innovative and cool, it does not necessarily mean they will genuinely benefit students. On the flip side though, when utilized for authentic purposes, technology does have the potential to change the way our students learn and even the way they think.

As I reflect on effective teaching strategies when integrating technology into the classroom, I realize that developing procedural knowledge is an essential task that all teachers must prioritize. Integrating new technologies, like VoiceThread or Prezis, into the classroom are useless if students are unable to 1) easily use them and 2) are unable to make a connection with why they are using a particular mode for a particular purpose. It returns to the idea of form = audience + purpose, but if students are unable to make meaningful connections with technology as an educational tool, the rationale for learning how to use it is virtually pointless. Integrating technology into the classroom and addressing digital literacies is by no means an easy task, and as teachers continue to adapt and grow as our society transforms, it is imperative that objectives and teaching methods change with it. I’ve realized that if I expect my students to critically employ new technologies, as a teacher, I too must have an extensive technological knowledge base that students can tap into as they develop in their digital lives. CEP 810 has laid this digital foundation for my own future teaching practices.

The assignment I felt best exemplified good teaching with technology is our SIG group presentation. Specifically, our group focused on using social media (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) in the classroom to assist learning. I believe the premise of our group exemplified good teaching because we chose to address a topic that is constantly present in our high school classrooms (i.e. students always using their phones to access these and other social networking sites). We acknowledged this shift in our classroom and chose to explore how it could be beneficial in a learning environment. Through creating our presentation, our group also explored more intricate applications in Google Docs, which we agreed would be the most (immediately) useful technology in our classroom. Additionally, I believe that the very concept of group work exemplifies good teaching with technology because collaboration and communication are skills all students will need in order to be successful in the 21st century. Over the years, technology has made these skills even more vital to our lives.

In my Personal Growth Plan, I mentioned that I wanted to explore one or two new applications in greater depth, and I do feel that I gained a better understanding of Google Docs since I had the opportunity to use it in my SIG presentation and learned (first-hand) many of its operations. For instance, I figured out how to imbed videos, which greatly added to our presentation. However, I also realized that a course like CEP 810 introduces so many new technologies, that it is difficult to focus on just one or two. Therefore, over the course of this semester, I enriched my own background in technology by experimenting with a broad array of innovative online applications such as Storify and Google Lit Trips, which I may not have discovered if it wasn’t for this course. I have also taken information I have learned from this class (i.e. Google Lit Trips) and have collaborated with other educators in my department to promote a positive change toward utilizing technology in the classroom. There are even plans to have Google Earth (needed to use Google Lit Trips) installed on all of the computers in one of our computer labs at school. These changes compliment what I previously mentioned in my Personal Growth Plan about believing that it is my responsibility to help students adapt to the speed at which our world is changing and embrace new technologies in a positive way.

A specific goal I had for this course was to become a bigger advocate of online applications (specifically Moodle, as we use this district wide) by requiring students to turn in assignments online. Unfortunately, I did not utilize this tool as well as I had hoped, and while over the course of the semester I encouraged students to upload assignments to Moodle and to use Google Docs for group presentations, I did not make it a requirement. I did find it difficult to introduce new technological tools and requirements at the end of the school year, but already have the intentions of incorporating them into the framework of my courses in September.

As I plan for the fall, I intend to include blogging into my lessons, but I also acknowledge that including new technologies into the curriculum must be done in a thoughtful manner in order to be effective. For instance, if I ask students to post responses or questions about the day's lesson or literature group discussion, but then don’t integrate their responses/questions/comments into future classroom discussions, then they remain a detached learning experience that doesn't serve the purposes it was intended to serve. My long-term goal is to ensure that students know that what they are doing is meaningful and relevant to their education. As a result, another goal of mine is to determine how to best assess my students’ progress and growth from using these new technologies.

Finally, in regards to one of our more recent class topics, using mobile devices in the classroom, I have new plans to utilize cell phones during class time by January (end of the first semester) with the intent of using them as polling devices for short grammar and literature quizzes, vocabulary building, and feedback on the course. Instead of asking students to put their cell phones away during class, I believe that integrating these technologies into lessons (as well as teaching tech-etiquette) will encourage them to value technology for its educational purposes, and not just as a form of entertainment.