Course Reflection

It’s been eight weeks since I created this blog. Back then, creating a blog seemed like an amazing and impossible task. However, that was the easiest of the tasks I’ve worked on in this course. I learned how to use a wiki and I created a podcast. My skills and expertise and especially, my confidence, increased due to the information I’ve gained in this course. Like many teachers, I use technology for research and homework examples, for critical questions to assess deeper a level of understanding from my students, and for increased student collaboration.

As a teacher, this course deepened my knowledge of the teaching and learning process. I gained insight about the instincts and awareness of my students and their learning progression. Prensky’s articles assigned a name, “digital natives,” that defines those who have grown up in the digital world (Prensky, 2001). I find his explanations to be extremely understandable, insightful, and useful. Additionally, the use of learning objects to enhance student understanding puts a name to resources I’ve been utilizing with the Promethean Interactive Board, thereby validating my instincts and professional skills (Cramer, 2007).
These and other articles gave me increased knowledge of my students abilities and encouraged me to consider student use of cell phones, video games, and Internet social spaces as ways to harness the skills they use so often and competently outside of the classroom. This course caused me to change my mind about the impact of technology. Rather than viewing these things as a hindrance or as competition to education, I can see the benefits they offer. Administering a technology use survey to my students showed me that student use of the Internet and other technology within the school building is really much less than its use outside. I now look at its use in a different way.

I feel increasingly competent in my ability to introduce and use technology in new and different ways within my classroom. As I experience the pitfalls of the first few collaborative experiences, I know that I will learn navigation skills. I’ve also learned that I’m not alone. The internet is not the scary place I imagined where everyone else is an expert compared to novice me. With the plethora of blogs and search engines out there, if I have a question, I now know that I can send my question out there and a helpful person will most likely answer my question or point me in the right direction.

Developing technology skills will enhance student engagement. This course advocates the use of critical thinking and reasoning skills as 21st century skills that will be crucial to student success. Because I am a “digital immigrant” (Prensky, 2001) I have to work to keep up the momentum I felt at the beginning and middle of the course as I created a personal blog, collaborated on a wiki, and interviewed students for a podcast. At the time, I couldn’t wait to integrate these exciting resources into my classroom. I signed up for classroom wikis, I reserved computer labs, and I created an assignment. However, the computer labs were needed for school-wide testing, I had trouble navigating the wiki space, and my student assignment was pushed back. It would be very easy to fall back into old habits, old teaching strategies, and old assignments. But, I can’t let that happen. This weekend, I plan to jumpstart my ideas, sharpen my skills, and ready myself for the wiki experience.

Increased engagement leads to increased achievement. I envision that creative, authentic assignments, repleat in student digital native skills will result in less missing, incomplete, or sloppy student work. In this innovative classroom, my hope is that I will not be tracking students down to complete their work; they’ll be tracking me down to turn it in.

Two long term goals I have are to use technology to do different things and to update assignments to have a student-centered approach. I have begun to change my perspective from being teacher-centered to being student-centered. In the last few weeks I have incorporated more student discourse in my classes by including opportunities for students to collaborate on some part of the lesson as often as possible. My goal is to make this happen daily (at the moment this occurs about two to three times per week).

The biggest difference I can see so far is that the reading I have done and will continue to do has made me examine my habits. As Thornburg says, “Teachers must do new things, not just do old things in a different way…It’s not ok to put old wine in a new bottle” (Laureate, 2008). My plan in the short term is to incorporate the use of wikis in my classroom. This quarter, I expect that students will have the opportunity to publish at least two projects there. The long term goal I have for the next few years is to look at my curriculum with a new set of eyes. Presently, each quarter, there are common assignments that are mandated to be written across the county. Rather than looking at these as an obstacle, I plan to use my students’ interest in technology as an impetus for creative assignments. These “must-do” assignments can be “tweaked” to include a student perspective; I need to make the learning and the application as authentic as possible. For instance, instead of just talking about the humor in Shakespeare and hoping students notice and understand it, I asked my students to bring in examples of humor they see on television, in books, in movies. Using these ideas as a stimulus, we then looked at the humor in Shakespeare in a new light. My students are beginning to make connections between the past and present easier and more enthusiastically. We all win.

References

Cramer, S. (2007). Update your classroom with learning objects and twenty-first century skills. Clearing House, 80(3), 126–132.

Laureate Education, Inc. (2008). Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, & Society. "The Changing Work Environment, Part I." Baltimore: Author.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5).