Personal Summary
I am a K-12 teacher working in the Yukon. I have been teaching for 4 years and I have always tried to include technology in my practice. It has been an integral part of my life and it would be odd to not include it as much in my teaching as I do in my personal life. This being said, I often find myself challenged with how technology is best used in my classes, how to assess more fairly and accurately across platforms, and how that could be represented in marks. It has also been difficult proving the validity of my teaching methods to staff and parents. These are some of the challenges I was facing and the reasons why I chose to enroll on the MET program.
Précis of flight path
My main goals for this course were to learn how to better select technologies, better assess work, and spend less time struggling with making technology work the way I needed it to. The result of this being less time wasted and more time spend working with students, perfecting my delivery of blended courses. I looked at my practice through the lense of the The National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers’ survey (2008). I established student learning and creativity to be my strength due to small class sizes, student motivation, and my own creativity in lesson design. I pinpointed assessment to be an area I would like to improve in, especially as it is a focus for the territory currently. I also identified improving my skills with Moodle as a goal. I had just started working with it and no training was provided by our district
In any case, I felt like, in this world of changing technologies and ideas, we were all learning together to see what worked best in different communities and with different classroom dynamics. I identified my school climate and technological infrastructure. Since I have arrived in the school, we have managed to procure a 3d printer, laptops for every student, and I have a new smart board projector that was installed over spring break! Our principal is very supportive if we take the initiative. By taking the initiative to use more technologically to facilitate and inspire teaching, we are also helping to encourage technology use in the school. I am always open to discussing and sharing techniques with other teachers, and luckily in a small school, people are very aware of what is happening in other classrooms. I decided that a goal for ETEC 565 would be to learn about the newest technological innovations, improve my practice, and bring new ideas about teaching and learning into our school culture.
ETEC 565 Reflection
This course for me has been both enlightening and frustrating. Throughout the time of the course I have organized a festival, written report cards, gone on vacation, and continued to be an active member of the community. I struggled with connecting with a course wholly online that seemed so disconnected from my daily life. I did however enjoy what I was learning and brought it into my lessons. I discussed interesting items with students and asked their opinion for how they like to learn. I think it is important to have this dialogue with your students, at least at the high school level. Their suggestions and ideas help to keep me relevant. Keeping abreast of technological trends through them will help me to continue to be a lifelong learner. Also, taking a master’s degree (or coursework) while being a teacher is a good way to model how students should behave. They need to learn to organize their life to plan for work, school, extra curriculars, homework, and familial obligations and it is good for them to have an example for how that might look.
During this course, I had a hard time interpreting assignments and I think this is because it was online. I don’t connect very well with others in an online environment and generally my understanding of assignments comes from class discussions about plans and reminders and suggestions from professors. I let my own ideas get away from me and that became a problem. I will be finishing up the last two courses from my program next semester. I hope that the lessons I learned here will help me and that I will look more carefully at assignment descriptions in the future. My takeaways from the course will be the Moodle I worked to create, the SECTIONS model as a way of choosing new technologies (Bates, 2014), broader possibilities for mobile devices in the classroom, some improved suggestions for assessment, and some of the predictions for the future that help to identify technologies that may be better to focus upon.
Next Steps
Over the course of the the MET program I am always bringing up and discussing what I learn with my colleagues. Our district would very much like to bring more technology into the classroom but, aside from myself, there is not very much interest from the staff. This is why, when our school received funding for new epson smart projector, it was placed in my classroom. For the future I would love to experiment with it and learn how to better utilize it in my classroom. I want to continue working with Moodle as my LMS and to see how they can be used in conjunction. I was also given apple TV and a class set of laptops and I’ve purchased an iPad for the classroom. I want to work with how all of these can be combined. I want to work to adapt traditional knowledge and topics of the area to the technological age. I want to streamline my teaching process to save time for both myself and my students. I hope that as I become more adept at using these technologies, that others in the school pick them up. Since I’ve been taking this course in particular I have helped two other teachers set up their own Moodle classroom. I hope that in the future this momentum builds and grows to fulfil Alexander’s predictions (2014) and create a truly blended classroom that fits into my student’s world.
Works Cited
Alexander, B. (2014). Higher education in 2014: Glimpsing the future. Educause Review, 4(5) Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/higher-education-2024-glimpsing-future?utm_s
ource=Informz&utm_medium=Email+marketing&utm_campaign=EDUCAUSE
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in the Digital Age. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
The International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). Standards for Teachers. Retrieved March 30, 2016, from http://www.iste.org/standards/ISTE-standards/standards-for-teachers