Technology Course

As all graduate teaching students know, the end of a class involves turning into Alice and once again peering into the looking glass i.e. reflection time. I just finished my first class focused solely on technology in the classroom. I learned about blogs, wikis, and podcasts along with the various obstacles and benefits associated with the new way of teaching digital learners.

The class was a wonderful starter to understanding and manipulating technology. My technology experience had stopped with blogging and facebook. The actual creation of media was foreign and a bit scary to imagine. Yet, this course taught me the simple basics of wikis and podcasts with the built-in prospects of learning and developing more interactive skills to be used in the classroom.

Of course, the lessons were not all about technology. Many issues focused on the way students learn in today’s progressive culture. I have begun to face the fact that students are becoming fundamentally different from the older generations in terms of processing information. Their exposure to technology as an informational relay system has altered the success rate of traditional teaching methods.

Having recently received my teaching certification, I was educated to create a classroom environment that was learner-centered. However, most of my classes neglected to give me the means to complete this goal. I admit that it is much easier to stand in front of the room and give a lecture while students take notes. Unfortunately, that type of teaching accomplishes very little with young students these days. This course has given me several prospective lessons as well as general ideas on how to keep the class in the hands of the students at least in the aspect of learning.

I look forward to my future courses in technology to help expand my teaching practices. I can also work to improve my methods by doing what my students are naturals at, namely, playing with and exploring the new technologies that are being developed every day. By using what many students are already aware of, I can hope to achieve a level of student involvement that is simply unattainable with just a textbook.

For the future I hope to incorporate at least three long term computer projects that instruct students on how to develop PowerPoint presentations, wiki pages, and podcasts. However, this will be dependent on how often I can use computer labs as well as the clearance I will need for students to work on sites that may be blocked as a school safety precaution. I would also like to develop a full use of a blogging site for students to interact with anonymity. However, I realize that there will have to be several measures taken in order to protect the students, myself, and the administration from misuse of the site by the inevitable bad judgment of individual students. Both of these major goals will require a large amount of preparation on my part along with a willingness to adjust my lessons and plans as obstacles and difficulties arise.

My only regret was that this class was held during the summer so I can only speculate how my classroom will change this upcoming year. I know that I have the skills and the desires to incorporate a variety of different technologies. I would also like to explore my students’ understandings and learning preferences through observation and direct questioning. Only time will tell how much I have actually learned and grown from this course in technology and education.

My very first podcast

Difficult to make...harder to upload...pretty simple and very interesting once I knew what I was doing. Of course, I was done at that point. Here's my first podcast. It's based on technology and involves interviews with three former students.

http://www.podcastmachine.com/podcasts/1487/episodes/6912#