Having worked at Ontario Hydro (OH) for 21 years, the road to my dream of becoming a teacher finally happened in 2003 when I was accepted to the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education program. I had always wanted to be a teacher and developed a love of technology at OH, first as a typist in the typing pool using magical word processing machines and then over the years as personal computers became popular with the many tools they offered such as Microsoft Word and email. OH offered many opportunities allowing me to earn my university degree at night school while continuing to work my way up the ladder with my career repeatedly moving into a teaching role. I began by training staff on email, moving onto teaching Microsoft Word and in my last position I trained both internal and external staff on the benefits of energy efficiency.
As a result of my experience at OH, working with technology as a teacher was a natural fit but it wasn’t until 2010 when I took my first Integrating Computer Technology course that I really had the opportunity to explore many of the tools that were available and luckily my school began to get more computers and Promethean Boards that I could use to further engage my students. I was using Edmodo and a wiki page for parents to access at home and see what was happening in our classroom. It was quite groundbreaking at the time.
Because of all the exciting things I was doing (or trying to do) with technology, I became very interested in becoming a technology consultant with our school board. I already had my Integrating Computer Technology Specialist but I felt that receiving a masters in technology may help me achieve this goal. Unfortunately I have applied to this position three times now and been unsuccessful each time. The second time I was the number two candidate but they needed someone who had more hardware experience than I did but now I believe there are just more qualified, younger staff who have more of what they must be looking for. As a result, I have taken a detour in my career path and hope to have a vice-principal position in the upcoming school year which I would not have been able to do without my master’s degree.
One area of interest for me with learning management systems (LMS) is the benefit to my students, which includes choosing the correct learning management system for all of us. While I am interested in learning about the various systems available, I feel that it is also important to choose one which fits in with the school board where I work. According to Nel, Dreyer and Carstens, it isn’t always wise to choose a technology independently as “Lone Ranger materials usually lack quality in the final product because of inappropriate technology decisions in the early stages of development” (p. 240). Because this is so important, I have already determined that I want to use either Google Classroom or D2L as these are both used in our board and I would be able to receive support should I need it. Both these platforms can be integrated with the GSuite of products, which is also important given the students and staff are already using these tools. While I have narrowed it down to two different platforms, I need to assess them both to see which would best meet the needs of my course considering their ability to encourage student-centred learning. The next assignment should assist me in making this determination.
Another key piece of LMS is ensuring the design meets the needs of both the students and the course it is being developed for. There are a number of questions to keep in mind such as those on page 241 of the Nel, Dreyer and Carstens paper such as “What are the best media/technologies to use to present/deliver the material?” While I have experiences with a variety of tools, I am sure there are many that I am completely unaware of that will assist me in making my students’ experiences more meaningful; that has already been made clear in some of the discussions such as the sharing of Vialogues, a tool I’d never heard of before. While I have a lot of experience using Youtube, in my last class I was introduced to Edpuzzle which allows the user to edit videos and add questions which I think would be a great instrument for assisting with keeping students on task. Below is a word cloud I created showing some of the tools I will be using or learning about as part of my exploration into LMS.
Ultimately I want to ensure that 
I am capable of developing an online or blended learning course that is pedagogically sound, is accessible to all my students, meets the criteria of being student centred, encourages collaboration and allows for all assessment including ongoing formative assessment. By pedagogically sound I mean that students are active learning, purposefully participating and using a variety of sources for meaningful tasks.
References
Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2010). The teacher as designer: Pedagogy in the new media age.E-Learning and Digital Media, 7(3), 200-222. doi:10.2304/elea.2010.7.3.200
Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 35(4) doi:10.4314/tvl.v35i4.53794
Zaied, A. N. (2007). No A Framework for Evaluating and Selecting Learning Technologies. The International Arab Journal of Information Technology,4(2), 141-147. Retrieved January 12, 2018, from http://ccis2k.org/iajit/PDF/vol.4,no.2/8-Zaied.pdf