Reflection

Our final blog post assignment for Walden University is to share our reflection over the past seven weeks with the class entitled " Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work and Society."  First, I would like to thank our professor Dr. Bordelon for helping expand my understanding and appreciation of the impact of technology especially for our students within the classroom. Taking graduate level courses while teaching is both challenging and reinvigorating.  I am enjoying the practical lessons that I can apply immediately in my teaching experience. This course in particular has awaken by desire to continue my blog website which I started several years ago and left to gather dust over time.  I am very glad to reconnect with my blog and my goal and desire is to continue blogging so that I can just share my teaching experience and also share some of the technology that I am incorporating within my classroom.

The technology tools that we focused on which were RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and podcasting which are not new to me. However, I was reminded how important and creative they can be within the classroom. Due to my position as computer teacher for middle school and ninth grade students, I was very excited to take a closer look at these fantastic web tools that have unlimited potential within schools. I am seeing my role to help facilitate these types of tools not only in my own class, but also to help the teachers within my school to also use them in their classroom. I understand that it is very difficult to incorporate these types of 21st century learner skills due to curriculum demands placed on teachers. Lack of time and resources tend to push back the opportunity to give due justice to much needed technology and media literacy skills that our students need today.  However, this course helped me to rethink how I can incorporate these much needed 21st century skills within my classroom and in the process help other teachers to do the same.  One key lesson that kept coming to the forefront of my thinking each week was that in order for 21st century skills to be develop in students, it must be first incorporated within the teacher.  There is no getting around this critical factor. The reality is that if I am not blogging, or using wikis or podcasting myself then it will be very difficult to transfer the passion and skills needed for my students. This became clear to me when I stopped using RSS feeds for my daily reading and information gathering.

One of my goals for my class is to do more collaborating projects with other teachers within my school and outside of my school. This will include student blogging and connecting with community members. I believe this will revolutionize my class and open the minds of my students to think beyond just working independently.

A second goal is have our school become a 1 to 1 computer school.  Especially on the high school level I would like to have our students with laptops in hand in each classroom and really move our technology skills and instruction forward. Our students are so hungry to use these tools and we need to be able to guide them in how to use them to benefit their learning experience.

As I move forward in my graduate program, I will continue sharing my experience and focus on becoming a better connector, content creator and collaborator.

Podcasting Interviews 21st Century Leaners

This past week for our Walden University graduate program we were assigned to create a podcast and interview 3 students regarding 21st Century Skills and Technology usage.  Please listen to the following podcast.  Due to time constraints, I wasn't able to share the full interviews with each student. You can listen by clicking on the following link:

http://leftridgeteacher60042.podomatic.com/entry/2014-12-01T10_41_19-08_00


Please share your comments and thank you for listening.