Personal Learning Reflection

I am coming to the end of my first Educational Technology course at MSU (CEP810). The experience has been a valuable one for me. I have learned a lot about various topics related to Ed Tech and I am thankful for the experience. At times it has been tough to stay motivated especially when I went away on vacation for a week, but overall, I am glad I took the course. Here are my thoughts about what I learned in some specific areas that the course covered.

Effective Teaching Strategies when integrating technology are very important. In this area, the course mainly confirmed my previous knowledge in the fact that technology needs to be relevant and benefit the overall learning experience for the student. It isn’t enough to integrate technology because it’s “cool” or will keep students interested. Technology has to help students learn. I also learned that I have to look at the time factor when integrating technology. I often get overwhelmed with planning lessons and grading. I can’t add something else to my plate that will be even more time consuming. For me to effectively integrate technology into my teaching, I have to choose a form of technology that will not take too much time. An example of this from the course that I will be using is Twitter. This year I am going to have my classes tweet as a summary of their learning. This is a quick way to integrate technology that helps students reflect as well.

Integrating the Internet was another factor in my learning. As I mentioned earlier, it was sometimes hard to stay on top of my assignments – especially since it is the summer. I had to keep myself going by making sure I set aside time to get things done. I had to force myself to not put things off. Overall, though, I liked the flexibility of being able to do things on my own time and take my learning anywhere.

Out of the assignments I turned in, I believe my SIG presentation on the iPhone really exemplifies good teaching with technology. This is because our presentation included so many apps that were practical for teachers to use to benefit their own learning as well as integrate into the classroom. Even though my school does not have iPods or iPhones, many of the apps would benefit me as I am purchasing the iPhone soon. I believe that this presentation helped me connect with iPhone features that will make me a better teacher.

The goals I laid out in my Personal Growth Plan were to “expand my knowledge of technology and its specific uses in the classroom” and specifically learn in the areas of “resizing images, blogging (consistency, relevance), parent communication, video and picture editing, technology for student inquiry-based learning.” I definitely expanded my knowledge in many of these areas. In particular, I achieved my blogging goal (consistency and relevance), parent communication – I plan to use a website I’ve created for this, and learned about some technologies for student inquiry-based learning (ex. Poll Everywhere).

My new goals are to continue to learn through Google Reader, expand my blog audience, and become more proficient at picture and video editing as well as Prezi creation. To reach these goals, I am going to continue with the Ed Tech certificate program at MSU. I will also learn from fellow teachers that are proficient in these areas and continue to work in these areas myself.