The Last Blogpost for EDU 533

The Finale

         Part 1: Your final assignment of the course is your course reflection. Here you will discuss what you Learned (The L of the KWL) from the beginning of the course to now. In this blog posting, please discuss the remaining course objectives you have recently met that were not met at the midterm of the course. List them out and discuss how you met them. This also where you reflect upon where you began before this class and what you have learned that will help you in your future as an educator.

         I have learned so much from the beginning to the end of this class. It has been a really interesting journey and I have learned a lot. I feel like one of the most important things a school must teach students is, how to be successful in their lives. Students must leave school having the knowledge and skills necessary for them to work, socialize and live on our planet. Technology has become a vital part of our world. I will go over how the class objectives have helped me understand and learn skills to help me become a great teacher.

         Objective 1 is, learn ways to promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding. It has been reinforced in this class that teachers do not need to have every single answer. If a teacher creates genuine discussions and the class has questions that no one can answer, that shows the students are engaged and are probably using higher order thinking. Gone are the times when teachers would stand in the front of the room and lecture and the students would soak up the knowledge like sponges, with technology students can have a world of knowledge at their fingertips. Getting kids in groups and having the teacher join the groups has become a great way to allow students to share and grow ideas that they think up.

         Objective 2 is, demonstrate an understanding of safe, ethical, legal and moral practices related to digital information and technology. Since everyone in our class has an undergrad degree, we all know ways to cite our sources, or we have bookmarks reminding us of how to cite. I was appreciative of learning about images and the correct way to use them and credit them. I have learned that there is no universally correct way to cite an image but I have been using an accepted method to cite all of my image sources since learning the way during a homework assignment.

Red Apple from Wikimedia Commons

         Illustrate through application how state and national standards are implemented within the curriculum is the 3^rd objective. This is a very important topic since our schools and thus, our classrooms, must comply with these standards. It is extremely important I know these and follow them since I want to be a teacher, and I want to be a teacher for a long time. It was nice to get some practice in how to implement the standards with our lesson plan and webquest assignments.

         Objective 4 is, demonstrate an understanding of the use of assistive and adaptive technologies and other digital resources to personalize and differentiate learning activities for every student. I think we learned clear and easy ways to use technology to help students. Students with 504s or IEPs will benefit from multimedia lessons using videos, images, games or other interactive activities. Enrichment can be achieved by having students research and learn more and take topics further. There are computer programs that allow users to put on headphones and listen to whole books, and other programs that can listen and type what a person says into a microphone. All of these programs can be used to assist a student. Objective 5 is, evaluate and reflect on emerging tools and trends by reviewing current research and professional literature. We did our big literature review paper for this topic. We also learned with our textbook, TED talks and other Internet searches but I feel we learned so much more from utilizing the tools and discussing the trends. We have learned how to make intro videos to hook students into a topic, make webquests for students to learn from and how to make a blog so that the world can read about our classes’ adventures.

         The final objective is, turn theory into practice by completing 5 hours of related field experience. This was an amazing experience. I got to watch a teacher, who is know for integrating technology, in his classroom. The class project was world explorers, but the technology piece was that the class was partnered with another class in Sophia, Bulgaria! What a great use of technology!

         While some of these objectives were met before midterm I feel they were firmed up during the second half of the term. These were all very important topics to learn. These will all help me be a good teacher. I appreciate learning the standards so I know my goals and requirements in the classroom. I have learned a lot about how to use and implement technology. I will definitely use all the skills I have learned in my future classroom. One of the most important things I have learned is that I should be a lifelong learner.

         I knew a little before this class. I had seen teachers at my school work with student’s in groups. I had seen teachers say they did not know the answer to a student’s question. I had seen the use of technology some in classrooms. I enjoyed seeing a 5^th grade classroom form their own experiments and show the properties of the states of water. Working in a school has given me those experiences and that is why I decided to become a teacher.

Part 2: Answer the following question: Why is it important for all teachers to integrate technology into the lessons they teach, regardless the age of the students? Discuss what may be barriers to technology integration and how you as the teacher can overcome them. Using what you have learned throughout the course, please provide examples and information to support your answer. Within this blog entry, please discuss some web2.0 tools that would assist with technology integration.

         It is important for all teachers to integrate technology into lessons because we must prepare future generations for their whole lives and technology will be a huge part of their lives. Jobs, communications, knowledge and many other things will have technology incorporated into them, if they don’t already have it. I look at EDU 533 and we are becoming teachers, we still need to stay current with new technologies and how to implement them in the classroom. We have learned that educators should be lifelong learners, it is the best way to help our students achieve their full potentials. With our knowledge and with technology our classrooms can help students learn and grow more than the past classroom models. We can use multimedia lessons to help students understand and experiment with knowledge. We can Skype with other classes, authors, scientists or anyone in the world with an Internet connection. We can use Edmodo to give students a place to talk about assigned videos. We can then use blogs to talk about what we have learned and our thoughts.

         If we have trouble integrating technology and ideas into our classroom due to staff or parents being against or afraid of the ideas, we could turn to online communities for encouragement, support and ideas to help teach the staff or parents about the benefits and advantages of integration. The budget and supplies may be a barrier to integrating technology into our schools or classrooms. We can use whatever is available and be thankful for what we can use and do with those devices. We can turn again to our online communities or our schools’ communities to ask for assistance and support.