Reflection

During this course, I was able to improve my knowledge of certain resources such as wikis, blogs, and podcasts. This exposure has helped me find, learn, and utilize technology more into my classroom. The experience has helped my develop new teaching strategies, and it also opened my eyes to the need students have of using technology to learn. I was able to see how much more interested the students were when I proposed the use of these technologies within the curriculum. I was able to see how students learned better because I was using tools that were related to their everyday lives. Likewise, I was able to see how my teaching processes allowed me to become more of a facilitator rather than a drill instructor. The center of my teaching was more focused on the students because they were enveloped in guided projects rather than traditional instruction. The students would ask more questions, and if they did not, I was able to look at their work and ask inferring questions to them. The focus was no longer on me and my words or notes; the focus was on the students, their work, and their interpretations of the material.
I hope to expand my knowledge of new technologies, so I might find other uses for it within my classroom. I plan to attend seminars (when they are available) that include different types of technology, and maybe I will find something that will add another element to my classroom. In addition, I will check teaching blog sites for suggestions on different technologies or different uses for the technologies that I currently use.
One goal that I would like to achieve within the next two years is I would like to start a summer program where we teach students to use blogs, wikis, and podcasts as sources of information versus sources of communication. I want to setup summer assignments and projects over the summer, so students will have a chance to get ahead. This will help to overcome the time situation, and it will allow me to include more in depth instruction. To implement this plan, I would like to use blogs and wikis as the source of instruction as well as a source of practice. To accomplish this goal, I will have to talk to the administration to see if I can get funding and/or permission to do so. Even without funding, the program should not need much because it will all be done using free online resources. Luckily, the area in which I teach has a couple of libraries with a large supply of computers for anyone to use.
Another long term goal I have is to find funding to help students whose families cannot afford a computer. With that funding I hope to aid those families and offer classes to teach those families how to use them and explore their abilities. With this program, I hope to overcome the financial issues that schools are having, and at the same time, I hope to include the families in their child's learning. Likewise, this will allow my students a better opportunity to engage themselves with the digital projects without the time restraint of school since they will have a computer at home. To accomplish this goal, I will need to do some research and hopefully find a program that either donates computers to low-income families or supplies funding for low-income families to buy one themselves. At the same time, I will need to talk with the administration and the county to offer a class to teach families how to use a computer properly. This should not be too hard because the only cost to the school would be the electricity used because there are plenty of people that would be willing to volunteer to help.