Thoughts on Educ 6710

Education 6710 has helped me to develop my technology skills as a teacher by exposing me to technologies that I had previously not used in an educational way, such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts. The course showed me ways to use these with students to enrich my classroom environment, reaching digital natives like I had previously been unable to do. The course also required me to develop the existing technology skills that I did have, such as uploading and downloading files, changing formats, and seeking out web resources that fit my needs, and adapt them to useable skills for a teacher.

I learned through this course that students today think differently than the students that we were taught to teach when in our undergraduate education courses. Today’s students need multitasking and parallel streams of information to reach their full potential, and the technology that we explored is an excellent avenue for achieving this.

Before beginning this course, I felt that my teaching was quite student-centered, but now I see many new ways that I could make my teaching far more student-centered, by using technology to give the students some ownership of the acquisition and showcasing of their learning.

I plan to continue to seek out new ways to use technology, and to share what I learn with my fellow faculty members, to continually cultivate my classroom as a learning environment. I will continue my studies, and even once I have completed my master’s degree, I will continue to research and consult with other teachers that value the use of technology in the classroom.

My biggest goal for the next two years is to create, and implement the use of, a classroom wiki. This will pose challenges with changing how students think about having some of the control of the class outcome turned over to them, as well as challenges concerning access to sites that may currently be “blanket-filtered”. This will take some work with my school’s IT coordinator, but she values the use of technology in our classrooms enough that I am sure that she would be more than willing to accommodate the students’ needs.

Another goal that I have, which is a sort of sub-goal of my main goal, is to implement the use student-created podcasts on the class wiki. I would like to use these for demonstration of oral proficiency. Within two years, I would like to implement a requirement that students visit the wiki at regular intervals to listen to a Spanish audio prompt, record their oral response, and submit that as an assignment.

I am very pleased with the “return-on-investment” I have received from the time I have spent on this class. With the school in which I teach, and the type of support I can expect from administration and my technology coordinator, I feel that my students will benefit immensely from what I have learned.

Profiling students

Okay, so it's not what it sounds like! I interviewed four of my students about their use of technology, and how interested they were in using it for different purposes. You can listen to my analysis of the interviews followed by their sometimes shy, and sometimes surprising and humorous responses here:

http://www.teachertube.com/members/music.php?music_id=147&title=Profiling_the_Students_of_Today

Enjoy!