When entering this course, I really had no expectations of the outcome. I was unsure what the concepts of educations technology would be. After looking at the syllabus and getting a better understanding of what we would be doing, I was really excited. The ideas of making a blog and a wiki were challenging ones that I never expected but I have found that I love using them. This course also introduced some new technology such as Wordle as well as Animoto which I was already familiar with. So granted, coming in I had no idea what to expect, I am very pleased with how this course has gone. I feel that I have achieved all goals set forth in the course and am excited to continue on working with by blog which has several followers as well as working on my wiki which is also my class website and seeing what new information is out there to continue my education in become a tech teacher.
I believe that this information that I gained in the class is very relevant to the work I do at school because I am using it every day. I try to update my blog on a daily basis. I have amazing followers who leave great comments and feel that I have built a great online community to help continue that education. I also use my wiki on a daily basis. It is the base of my classroom website and allows me to store lots of information for my parents. I have added spelling words, homework assignment, videos of last year’s students, information about myself and my classroom as well as any forms or documents that they can access and print at home to work on. I think this will benefit parents immensely since they are also very active in the digital world. I am excited about what is to come so that I can apply more to make myself a better teacher.
I feel that my principal competencies and internship plan are a little lacking. I know it is because of the rush to get back to school as well as the time constraints on the last week of the course. I have been working non-stop on my classroom and preparing my lessons and feel that I have not spent as much time working on the course as I did at the beginning. There is also the time constraint with meeting my mentor teacher as she also has much to do to prepare for the new school year. I have some issues with remembering to include documentation with my replies on the discussion board as well. I tend to treat it as discussion where I would not be constantly citing someone as opposed to going out to find someone who agrees with me and them adding my comments. I am used to the discussion board since I used it every week in my undergraduate courses but I was not required to cite someone with every posting.
I believe that I was successful in carrying out the assignments. I really enjoyed reading the book for our technology review. I was afraid that it would take too much time but found that I enjoyed the book and the new ideas so much that I finished it in only two days. I also enjoyed the reading assignment but had some issues working the school library system so I ended up finding the articles online myself. That ended up being hard work on occasion since there is just so much information available out there. I did have some issues working on the internship plan simply because there was not a lot of information out there. I did try to go online to access other templates that I could use for examples. I feel that overall I was successful and hope to continue to get more great information from the other courses.
I feel that I learned a great deal from this course. As I said before I am very glad I had the opportunity to make a blog and a wiki since I am continuing to use them every day. I enjoyed reading Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. I think it really got into why these tools are important and why they appeal to so many students and educators. Along with the information, I learned that when I am really interested in a topic, I will work until it is done. I spent many hours working on my wiki to get everything to look just as I want. I enjoy how everything is laid out and organized under tabs. I really like how my students and their families will have easy access to all that is happening in the classroom any time of day. I am hopeful that I get as much great information from every class as I did from this one.
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