What I have learned in this class:
This summer I've learned about technology in education. For the most part I didn't even know most of the technologies existed and was intimidated to use them when I read our assignments. After working with these technologies week-by-week this summer I have become quite enthusiastic about each technology and about applying them in the classroom this coming school year. I have already created course sites for both subjects I will be teaching this school year and have begun populating them with the appropriate learning resources for the first unit. This will be an absolutely invaluable resource for the students and will be a very good communication resource for me to parents as well. Parents can go on these sites and see the materials I am providing, and the organization and quality of these materials should impress the most demanding parent and give them faith in the quality of the education their children are receiving. As a teacher of chemistry and physics I usually get the students who are on the track to attend a four-year university. Parents of children on this track are often engaged in their children's education and this type of organization and presentation should go a long way in winning their confidence. I am also quite excited in the programs that use audio, such as podcast, and interactive audio and visual such as edupuzzle. These programs allow me to provide learning resources to students of every learning type. I also am quite taken by movie story which seem to be so engaging for students and will draw their attention to the material in a deeper way. To conclude, this course has been extremely valuable for me. I was forced to learn these technologies and found that they are quite intuitive and not at all hard to learn. This epiphany makes me so much more confident in my ability to engage 21st century learners with digital learning material which will not seem foreign or antiquated to these technology immersed students of today. The following discussion of the list of tools we were introduce to this summer is provided as required: Learning Tools introduced in this class:
My Strong Points in Educational Technology: My strong point in educational technology is my desire and willingness to use any technology and any strategy that would engage my students and make me a better and more effective teacher. That willingness and desire means that I will give these technologies a try and see how my students engage with them. I love the idea of students being able to access a variety of digital materials at any time and from whatever device they choose. This course has given me a much larger view of how I can use these technologies to improve and better engage my students. My Weak Points in Educational Technology: Without a doubt my weak points come from my status as a technology immigrant. As I like to say, when I grew up high technology was a long telephone cord. I was an adult before the internet became common place. As such, computer technology can be intimidating and over-whelming. Engaging in on-line technologies requires me to leave my comfort zone and often makes me feel like a complete idiot. While I see so much good the internet and social media have brought to the world, I also see how many problems they have caused. I’m not sure it’s a better world or not but it is the world we have, and we will not be going backwards. So then, if I want to be an effective teacher it is incumbent on me to learn, to engage. As we said in the military I need to innovate, adapt and overcome. Will I integrate these technologies into my classroom? Why or why not? I will certainly integrate these technologies into my classroom as I have stated repeatedly in this final reflection and for the reasons I have stated as well. Not to integrate technology into my classroom would be to give up in my attempt to engage my students. I have no intention to give up on the goal of student engagement. We have to meet them where they are. They are immersed in technology. We, therefore, must integrate these technologies into the classroom. My Future Learning Goals: This has been an excellent course this summer. It has introduced me to new technologies, and I have a much greater vision for how to put these tools into my educational toolbox. I intend to continue to learn. I especially need to learn ways to incorporate these tools to engage students. I am convinced that we have to meet our students where they are and with the tools most likely to engage their interest. For that, I now believe that technology is the key. To that end, my future plans are to use these tools in new and innovative ways. I will use them this year and gather information as to how students are engaging with them. I also want to experiment with the idea of the “flipped” classroom. I can see potential in that, especially for courses like chemistry and physics where students are typically university bound. The flipped classroom doesn’t seem that different than what they will experience at the next level. It puts them in charge of their own educational experience and that is surely what they will experience in university. So my future learning goals are set. I’ll incorporate many of these technologies that I’ve learned this summer. I’ll evaluate their effectiveness and continue to learn new strategies to better employ these technologies. The goal remains the same. I will engage these students by whatever means necessary. Technology is the water they swim in and I need to swim in that same water if I intend to achieve the goal.
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This week I developed five different online resources: Padlet, Quizziz, Rubric, Thinglink interactive photo and a Scoopit online magazine. Each have power and purpose in the classroom. Below I will explain my ideas on each one and explain how I would use each in the classroom.
Padlet: A padlet is a great organizing resource that allows you to post different resources that were created not only by the teacher but by others. It's nice to be able to post many different types of media from video's to slides, edpuzzles and articles. I would use a Padlet to post all the lesson resources that I have for the chapter or unit. This would allow students to access materials at any time and study at their leisure. Quizziz: I found this to be a great resource for quiz making. The site possesses a wealth of quiz material already in its library which makes using Quizziz much faster and more powerful than writing a quiz from scratch. I believe Quizziz to be different from Quizlet because I can choose to give the quiz synchronously or asynchronously. This is a great option for teaching as I can make it an interactive activity or something students do on their own. In my class I plan to use quizziz for daily quizzes which I call "reality checks". I like the thought of using Quizziz because it immediately shows the results of students which will save me time with grading. Rubric (Rubistar): This was an awesome resource. I routinely use rubrics and find them both tedious and time consuming to prepare. Rubistar was easy to use and writes the rubric itself with minimal input from me. Finding this site not only frees up a lot of my time, it probably writes a better rubric than I would by myself. I will use this site weekly to produce rubrics for labs and activities and projects, etc. Thinglink interactive photo: This is a fascinating resource that could be great for visual learners. It is engaging and visually stunning. I could use this explaining certain topics to better meet all learning styles. Scoopit: Scoopit is a great resource to post intriguing articles and resources. These are resources that students wouldn't normally find on their own and it's a great way to bring new ideas to light. I would use this in my classroom as a "pick your own reading" activity where students could choose to read what interests them most and write a summary of the article. This is a great way to integrate differentiation as students can choose what is best for them. Todays Question: Chapter 12 No. 1: As emerging technologies continue to affect education, there is little question that the role of the teacher will change. Imagine yourself teaching a class in 20 years. How do you think your role would be different from the typical teacher's role today? Technology is quickly taking over in many facets of society and education is no different. As technologies become ever more powerful it allows teachers to differentiate instruction to different learning styles. I see education moving towards students having an individual education plan which meets their own individual learning style. Educators will be providing materials and resources in many different formats and focused on each student as an individual. Our project for the week was to build a class website. This is a perfect project as school approaches quickly. This class has proven to be exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. A class website (Chemistry Page) is the perfect platform for posting weekly agenda's, lesson plans and the resources required for those lessons. It also allows us to put great resources that we have researched and approved.
Creating the class website proved to be an eye-opening experience. I was actually quite amazed at how easy it is to create one of these- and it is free! After learning how to drag and drop features into the pages, creating features became more or less intuitive. I will continue to use the weebly class website I created as the school year begins. Now that I have a structure to the website, and better understanding of how the creation aspect works, I feel confident in my ability to maintain a class website throughout the academic year. Below you will find the link to my class website: https://rhs-chemistry.weebly.com
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