The life and times of MET student

Some information about me:

• I am a new teacher in the West Vancouver School district, and although it can be stressful, I love my job! I can’t imagine doing anything else.
• I decided to complete my Masters in Educational Technology a few reasons.  Firstly, I wanted to study something that would be exciting and relevant several years down the road.  Also, in learning about some of the interesting developments in the field of educational technology during my B. Ed. Degree, I realized what useful and interesting tool technology can be in education.  Finally, I began to see how lacking my own skills and knowledge in technology were, and wanted expand them to the point where I could easily use them to improve my teaching, and share my knowledge with others.

My Experience:

• This is my second course of the MET program.  I started by taking ETEC 512, a course based more in theory. 
• This is my third year as an elementary school teacher.  I spent my first two years as a TOC, in addition to working part-time in my second year.  I currently have a full-time contract that is changing to part-time in about a month.  Just waiting for the magic words: “continuing contract”!
• I attended UBC for my B. Ed. and B.A. degrees.  
• I have always been interested in technology, but have never taken any tech. courses outside of the MET program.  As a result, my skills in and knowledge of technology are about average.  I am just starting to explore the exciting world of blogs, wikis, and e-portfolios.  

My Goals in ETEC 565a:

1.     To have a firm grasp on how to effectively use learning management systems, like Moodle, (which I have never used before), so that I could easily set up and maintain my own LMS.

2.      To increase my knowledge of various digital communication tools, so that I can improve my communication with parents and students, and students’ communication with each other.

3.     To be able to effectively use social media like wikis as a learning tool to encourage collaborative and cooperative learning amongst students.

Resources I need to achieve these goals:

• To achieve my first goal, it seems that Moodle is quite easy to set-up and use,  but it can be a bit difficult to maintain, so I would likely need the cooperation and help from those who manage my school’s network. (based upon Perkins and Pfaffman 2006 article, “Using a course management system to improve classroom communication”)
• To achieve my second goal, mastery of the use of LMS sites like Moodle would aid in improving parent and student communication.  As described in the Perkins and Pfaffman 2006 article, “It provides students access to presentations and assignments at their convenience. It provides parents a way to stay current on what their children are learning in school and to encourage prompt completion of assignments.” (p. 37). 
• To achieve my third goal, I would need resources that provide me with information on the features of various wikis, to help decide which would be most suitable for use in an e-learning setting.  As mentioned in the article “Teaching and learning online with wikis” by Augar, Raitman and Zhou, “features such as authentication and tracking are required for wikis to be suitable for teaching and learning online” (p. 103).