Course Reflection

Course Reflection

The following dialogue is a reflection of my learning throughout the graduate course entitled Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society.  In this reflection I will address the ways the course has helped me to develop my own skills and knowledge in the area of technology, teaching, and learning in a more student-centered environment.  I will also address the continued expansion of my knowledge and skills, as well as goals for ensuring long-term success in the integration of technology into my classroom.

Over the past seven weeks I have been exposed to many new and exciting concepts which have added to my knowledge and skills as a computer teacher.  The course has helped me develop three skills that I had not previously considered utilizing at the elementary level.  Creating podcasts, exploring blogs, and the utilization of wikis were skills that were familiar to me; however, I did not feel I had the expertise to teach them effectively.  The insight gained from Dr. David Thornburg, Dr. Christopher Dede, Will Richardson (2010), and my fellow classmates has given me the knowledge and confidence to begin integrating more collaborative technology into my current teaching practices.

The course has deepened my knowledge in the learning process of today’s digital natives (Prensky, 2001) and has also heightened my understanding of how technology is effecting the rapidly changing working environment.  As the purpose of education is to prepare our students for the “real world”, which is evolving at a much faster rate than education, teachers must be willing to utilize the digital skill set that learners bring with them in order to help develop their skills in a way that is meaningful and relevant to their futures – not our pasts.        

Doing different things rather than just doing the same things differently (Thornburg, 2004) is a phrase that has stuck with me throughout this course and has helped to reflect on my own teaching practices.  Because of this I now think about my own lessons and activities in a more critical way.  I now ask myself:  Is what I am teaching going to help my students to create work that can be shared with others or will it just be done and forgotten?

In order for my own teaching practices to evolve and become more student-centered I must be willing to give the students more control in their own learning.  The notion that the room revolves around my own knowledge has become obsolete.  And to be perfectly honest, I am happy to see it go.  As society and technology rapidly evolve, it becomes impossible for any one person to keep up with all the latest information.  However, in a student-centered environment, one can model how to find the new information thereby allowing the students to gain new skills, while learning to think for themselves.  My attention could then be focused on teaching students skills needed to evaluate and process the vast amounts of information they are accessing.

As a means of continuing to expand my own knowledge of technology integration into the classroom I will continue to seek out professional development focusing on utilizing technology to increase student achievement.  In conjunction, I will broaden my learning communities to include more global conversation, and deepen my research in areas of weakness. 

To assure the transformation of my classroom environment, two long-term goals have been established.  The first goal is for every fourth and fifth grade student to become competent in the use of email as a tool for collaboration.  The largest obstacle has already been overcome: getting all the email accounts set up through a safe and monitored provider.  A second formidable obstacle is time.  As I currently teach over two-hundred fourth and fifth graders, finding the time to address each student’s needs individually will prove challenging.  To overcome this obstacle I will be grouping their emails by grade section, thereby creating smaller more manageable groups.  My second long term goal is to incorporate more virtual learning into the classroom.  Many of my students are already fascinated by AVATARS and sites such as Second Life, webkinz, and Poptropica.  Dr. Christopher Dede called this multiuser interfaced learning the Neo-Millennial Learning Style, whereas learners engage in more collaborative experiences rather than individual learning (Dede, 2010).  This goal will allow my students to learn in an environment that promotes collaboration, complex communication (Levy & Murnane, 2006), and is familiar to them and their unique skill sets as digital natives.  The main obstacle in utilizing virtual environments is finding environments that are suitable and safe for elementary level learners.  To overcome this, we will seek out monitored sites that provide students with a modest amount of protection and continue giving learners the skills and knowledge needed to stay safe while engaged in complex communication.

In referring back to the technology checklist from week one, I found that the four categories checked “sometimes” are the same four areas in which I have gained the most knowledge: student collaboration, better facilitation, better communication, and furthering my own professional growth.  Staying current in new and evolving technologies will be essential for me and my students if we are to succeed in the rapidly changing world of today.  By integrating more collaborative Web 2.0 activities into the curriculum and allowing students more responsibility for their own learning in a student-centered environment, I hope to give my students the opportunity to grow, learn, and thrive in todays’ digital world and tomorrows yet to be defined global society.  

References:

Levy, F., & Murnane, R. (2006). Why the changing American economy calls for twenty-first century learning: Answers to educators' questions. New Directions for Youth Development, 2006(110), 53–62.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5). Retrieved from http://proquest.umi.com.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/pqdweb?index=1&did=1074252411&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1296434139&clientId=70192

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Thornburg, D. (2004). Technology and education: Expectations, not options. (Executive Briefing No. 401). Retrieved from http://www.tcpdpodcast.org/briefings/expectations.pdf