Reflection

This course has excited me about teaching again. After last school year, I had hit a point where I felt like I needed to come up with new ideas and strategies. The methods I was using were working, but I felt like I needed to continue to bring in more technology. Throughout this class, I have gained several new methods to use technology to enhance my lessons. I am excited to try them out in the classroom and start seeing the results.

Going into this school year the challenge they have presented us is to start trying to podcast our lessons a few times, they call this flipping the instruction. In order to flip the instruction, I am going to need to incorporate a blog and podcasting. I have worked with blogging throughout the past couple years but had very little experience with podcasting. This course helped introduce me to many free resources that can help me in creating and editing podcasts. At first creating the podcast was a bit of a struggle, but after numerous attempts I little by little got better. I feel that being the student and learning how to podcast was extremely beneficial because now I truly know what the students will go through.

In this class, I learned a lot about how the teaching and learning process has changed. Students learn in complete different ways than they did in the past. They come into the classroom with a vast knowledge of technology and the ability to do reasearch online to find answers to their questions. The day of lecturing is gone, and teachers have to change their style to fit student needs. Instead of lecturing, students benefit from hands on investigative experiences. I have found in my classroom that students are much more engaged when the activities get them involved and connect to their lives.

Instead of teaching to the students I will become a facilitator of their learning. My focus will be on providing students meaningful experiences that teach them select skills. In my experience students retain the material when they have worked through projects or hands on experiences. When they work to discover a solution it is much more meaningful to them. So my goal for my classroom is not to lecture or teach to the students, but to be there as a tour guide to helping them discover the answers.

The thing that students and lots of adults do not understand about the teaching profession is that to be successful you have to be a life time learner. To continue to expand my knowledge, I will continue my learning through Walden University and keep an eye out for conferences involving technology in education. I will continue to join professional learning communities to collaborate with fellow teachers to keep up with current strategies of integrating technology into the classroom.

My first long term goal is to within two years max podcast each lesson that I do and post them to a blog. I want students to be able to go online anywhere and see what we are working on and get help. This will also give parents somewhere to go see what is happening in the classroom and get help if they are trying to assist their child with homework. To accomplish this, I plan on practicing this year and posting as many podcasts as I can. I also will work with other teachers that have had success making podcasts. The obstacles I will have to overcome is technology working in my school building and students having access to the materials at home. The technology at my building is something that get better each year; I will continue to work with the technology department to help them improve our setup. Student access will be solved by next year because every student will have a macbook to take home with them. If they do not have internet, I will upload the information to their computers through Itunes prior to them leaving school.

My second long term goal is to improve my parent contact through using technology. I will start out by creating a blog in which parents can communicate with myself and each other. On this blog, I will continuously post classroom information and daily homework assignments. I hope that this goal can be setup the start of next year and continue to be tweaked through collaboration with parents to become a valuable resource. Hopefully after year one I will have a full understanding of what information is most valuable to parents and what features they use the most and by the start of year two have a successful parent blog. The issue I could run into is parents that do not have computer access. To solve this, I would suggest that they borrow their students macbook to visit the blog daily.

When doing the checklist the first time the area that I set myself low in was enabling students to take control of their learning. Towards the end of the year, I became much more comfortable in providing activities that were student led. I was quite pleased with the results compared to where I directly taught them. The other area I was low in was seeking out help from other professionals. Throughout this class, I have become much more comfortable in seeking out advice from colleagues in my building and collaborating online with other fellow teachers. I have learned that I have lots of ideas to share and that I can gain a vast knowledge from others.

As I said, teachers have to be life long learners. The education field is constantly changing. It has changes so much from when I was a kid and in my short teaching career. This class has continued to improve my knowledge of incorporating technology, but I understand the process does not stop today. I have to constantly be on the look out for new ideas and willing to change my ways and learn something new. This is the only way I can guarantee that I am doing everything in my power to do what is best for my students.