Throughout the CEP 810 course I learned a lot about technology in education. Someone could go overboard on integrating technology into education, but that does not mean it is all effective. In order to be effective in teaching with technology, I believe that there needs to be a mix of different medias used so that students do not get bored. I also think that students need to be able to interact with the technology so that they can learn by "doing."
Integrating the Internet has helped me to think about uses of technology in a few different ways. For one, I had never been introduced to blogging in an educational setting prior to this course. I had no idea that there were students who wrote blogs that related to school topics and that other students would follow the blogs and respond to them. I had also never thought of Wikis as anything other than a resource to answer a question that I needed answered. It had never occurred to me that students could create them and add to them, nor did I even really know what they were. The RSS feed on Google Reader has also helped me. This was not a tool that I ever knew about before this class, but have found it useful to keep up with readings that I could often not even find. Reading other people's blogs and some of these articles has helped me to add new ideas to my repertoire of teaching tools.
Of all the assignments that I have turned in, I feel that the Prezi I created with my group member has best exemplified good teaching with technology. In this presentation, we proved that we could use a new tool to create a presentation to teach a topic. Not only did we use this new tool to get the message across, but we also proved that we have been using the SMARTBoard to engage our students in learning in the classroom. We showed the various ways that our students interacted with the technology to learn new material.
At the start of this course, I had set some goals for myself. So far I have not used Google Docs in the classroom, but I have definitely begun to use the SMARTBoard. I have found resources for interactive games that students absolutely love, and have done lessons that go with our writing plan. In writing, we read a non fiction text to students, then students came up with sentences about "How Animals Use Their Ears." I wrote their statements on the SMARTBoard and printed the notes out for each of them. Once they had a copy of all our sentences, we went through and crossed out what we didn't need, put some together that had similar content, and finally, wrote an organized paragraph. Because I could write on the board, show the work of crossing out what wasn't needed, and then add writing where needed, the students got a great handle on the concept we were trying to teach.
I am still working on the goals I set back at the start of the class. I would like to keep growing and learning as an educator and plan to do so by taking the next two courses in the MSU program. Another way I plan to grow as an educator is by keeping up with my RSS feed and contributing to threads on Twitter. I have already learned so much and can't imagine what else I will gain in the courses I take and am excited to use the tools that I have been introduced to.
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