May 04 2009
Flight Path
I am a fairly new teacher but not a fairly new person (!) who is currently teaching at an elementary school of 300 students in a small community. I had to fight pretty hard to get into this course and am quite happy to be here but I also have some fairly high expectations from this new course. I am a practical person who often refers to herself as a “bottom line kind of girl”. Thus far, I have found my experience in the MET to be predominantly theoretical in nature. While I agree that understanding the theories is key to being a good teacher most of us have probably already encountered these theories in our Education degrees. I was particularly attracted this course because of the promise of practical applications.
I have some limited experience with synchronous communication but really want to gain more in this area. My experience with LMS is limited to its use as a student. I have never had the opportunity to design or manage one of these environments and am hoping to gain some proficiency with this here. I am not a social networking user. I have not tweeted or poked anyone. While I have no real interest in these applications personally I am openminded to their potential use as an educator. In terms of assessment I am always interested in exploring new ways to assess student learning and have a real commitment to a variety of assessment tools in order to address a wide variety of learning styles.
My broader goals for my MET experience is to gain knowledge and skills that I can use to join the tech leaders in my school district. I want to be a 21st century teacher in my 20th century school district.
To attain my goals of becoming proficient in the technologies we will encounter in this class I will need some human resources. The support of classmates with a variety of expertise has proven very helpful in past MET courses and I fully expect that the depth and variety of experience of my fellow students will prove invaluable on this part of the journey as well.