Week 6 - Technology in the Classroom Final Words

How your view of instructional technology has or has not changed over the course of the semester.

At the beginning of this course I had a barrier to entry. While not completely ignorant of all technology, I was definitely just a browser of the Internet. Over the course of six weeks I am amazed that I have made a video, a wiki, two smartboard presentations, glogs, blogs, voki, and diigo-based set of bookmarks. I have been introduced to Web-based projects, organization tools, and tools to increase communication between students in my classroom as well as with parents and administrators. In a world where information communication and technology literacy is critical for students, I now have tools to provide them opportunities to mix content with technology.

The quality and appropriateness of what you have learned/created this semester.

I have found that the quality of my work has improved over time. The second smartboard presentation I made was much better than the first one. There were many iterations for my video and I gained speed and competency with each draft. My first voki took a ridiculous amount of time and concentration, but the most recent voki for my wiki was wicked fun and fast. Designing my wiki has been a work in progress. In the beginning I stressed over finding an appropriate picture, sizing it correctly, making the color background nice, what should the name be etc. Now I find I'm daydreaming about additional resources I want to add so that it can be a useful tool for my students. I appreciate that students will be able to increase and strengthen their understanding of the material presented in class by exploring the videos I embed or communicating with each other via the discussion board. As a former environmental scientist, I appreciate the opportunity to coordinate the wiki with use of google docs and google forms so assessment, project, and lab reports can be generated and submitted paperlessly.

Evaluation of your comfort moving forward with technology.

I am optimistic that moving forward I will find ways to integrate technology into my classroom. Last night I thought about using google reader to find and subscribe to at least one teacher resource sites that focuses on integrating technology into the classroom. I will also rely on my students to find cool and interesting resource sites. I will also keep reading my cohorts blogs, hopefully we will keep each other informed of the resources we find. This has been a wonderful experience.

Week 6 - Technology in the Classroom

When I started this program, I very quickly realized I was cohorts to some really clever people.  I have had the privilege of listening to my team mates and learning from team mates over the last six weeks.  I appreciate the directive to review my team mates blogs because up until today, I was very careful to review my mates blogs as little as possible for fear of plagiarizing, even unintentionally.  Using Google reader to read blog posts facilitated my review.  As I read everyone's blogs I felt like a kid in a candy store as I bookmarked one site from cohort A and two sites from cohort B.  My list of diigo bookmarks has doubled I think.

There are many sites that I appreciate being connected to; however, the Khan Academy, a site Nida wrote about, is going to be an amazing resource to me.  This site has a plethora of science- and math-related videos.  I organized my wiki so that each unit of instruction (e.g., Kinematics) is accompanied by a Glog on which are a series of related instructional and educational videos.  I watched several of Khan's videos and found them superior.  I believe this will become my first go-to site for supplemental videos.

Kahmir, N. (2011).  Instructional and learning resources - learning theories.  retrieved 07/05/11 from http://nik05001-studentofhistory.blogspot.com/