As a professional teacher, I feel this course has been instrumental in assisting me with developing my own technology skills. I am comfortable with the idea of creating podcast, weblogs, and wikispaces for my students to engage in relevant collaborative learning. I currently maintain a networked personal learning space of my own to enable me to have a better understanding of how interaction takes place using these learning tools. I appreciate the idea of subscribing to “feeds” through RSS so that current content created on the web (that I am interested in) is sent to me oppose to me retrieving it by visiting each website. Even more I like the aggregator tool which collects and organizes the content I subscribe to generated by the RSS feed. I am still learning how to search and download podcast on my iPad. I have successfully completed this task twice but merely through stumbling through it. I want to get to the point where I can confidently subscribe to podcast and they are automatically downloaded onto my iPad or droid heiress whenever they are connected to my pc.
The most critical knowledge of learning and teaching that I have come to understand is that there has been a shift in the way students learn today yet the teaching to accommodate this evolved style of learning is lagging behind. I must continue to pursue a well rounded understanding of how to close the gap between these two points in order to be an effective teaching professional in the 21st century. As far as being teacher-centered, I’ve never really cared for the idea. Our focus should be on the student and their abilities and responsibility to learn all they can in ways that are most effective.
I can continue to expand my knowledge of learning, teaching, and leading with technology with the aim of increasing student achievement by maintaining a networked personal space where I subscribe to websites and weblogs to stay abreast of the best practices associated with integrating technology into classroom learning. I can also use what I have learned from this course in my own class and invite administration and colleagues into my room through actual visits to sit in on lessons with their students. I can also invite them to visit my class weblog and wikispace or listen to a podcast created by my students communicating their learning. I feel most importantly, by sharing with my students the valuable ways to use technology tools for learning that will increase their success in school and their abilities to aim and obtain competitive careers in their future.
Within the next two years I plan to maintain both a weblog and wikispace in my classroom. The learning that takes there will hopefully grow not just with me but hopefully with my students as well. I hope to see them begin to take more ownership of their learning where they begin to value their own thinking and creativity to use them as tools whereby they take in more knowledge. I also plan to continue increasing my expertise in understanding 21st century skills to maximize my effectiveness in using instructional strategies that increase student learning. I plan to do this by visiting websites such as Partnership for 21st Century Skills to utilize all the resources they have available for preparing educators to be 21century educators.
