Week+5+Reflections

Week 5 Reflections: 1. What outcomes had you envisioned for this course? Did you achieve those outcomes? Did the actual course outcomes align with those that you envisioned? The course title of Teaching with Technology had led me to believe that I would be learning to teach using technology based assignments and assessments in my classroom. In this course, I learned numberous new technologies that can be applied in my classroom. The readings gave me very clear examples of how to integrate technology lessons, technology use, and technology assessments within my curriculum. The online textbook from Universal Designs for Learning gave me an entirely reference catalogue to search for ideas and lessons that can be implemented immediately within my curriculum that I teach. However, I was disappointed with the achievements of my group project. I am finding that most teachers in this program are language arts, elementary or early education teachers. While I learned a lot through creating the course project, I didn’t create anything immediately applicable in my own classroom as it was based for early education, language arts and I teach high school science. It would be useful in the future to find group members in the same curriculum so I could create projects related to my own curriculum. 2. To the extent that you achived the outcomes, are they still relevant to the work that you do in your school? Why or why not? Yes and no. I will definitely be able to use the Universal Design for Learning website to create lesson plans, as well as the same technology that we used within our group project. However, I will have to adapt them to my subject and grade level. Most of the work I do is targeted to Advanced Placement Physics and Chemistry, Conceptual Physics or Biology. Our group project was targeted to Elementary School Language Arts. We did integrate the topic of the digital stories to relate to science TEKS/TAKS objectives and that was helpful. For my courses that I teach, I have found great links to the National Science Standards page from UDL’s Resources page. I also found great ideas from several of the readings for Physics classrooms and using problem solving community forums to teach. If I can get permission from the web administrator at my school, I will be implementing these into my curriculum as soon as possible! 3. What outcomes did you not achieve? What prevented you from achieving them? Creation of technology lessons that are specific to my learning objectives. The group that I participated in had two teachers that taught Language Arts at the Elementary Level. However, I learned a lot about integrating Language Arts objectives into the Science curriculum. This is a great tool for me. In high school we sometimes tend to teach subjects in isolation of each other. With the experience from this program and the project that my group created, I have wonderful ideas on how to integrate a more cross curriculum type of technology project into my objectives for Science. This seems to be more applicable to the real world than creating science exclusive lessons. So I feel it was a great learning experience to work with people outside of my teaching area. I learned more than I would have learned had I stayed within my own curriculum. Therefore, you could say I exceeded my outcome expectations. 4. Were you successful in completing the course assignments? If not, what prevented or discouraged you? YES! I created and worked more diligently on the assignments for this course than previously. I learned to use AIM for online collaboration, Google Docs to plan and execute an action plan, the importance of having one person in control of website editing, and how to integrate my own knowledge into a grade level and curriculum that I was unfamiliar with. The assignments were challenging, but the rubrics helped to guide my work and challenged me to do more in depth work than I might have done without them. There were not any discouragements to the coursework for me. I had a little trouble with time and time management for this course, but in the end I worked it all out and got everything in on time. Week 3 and the amount of assignments, discussions, and project work for that week were challenging, but not discouraging. 5. What did you learn from this course: about yourself, your technology and leadership skills, and your attitudes? I mostly learned that I could spend all day “learning” about technology, and still be behind the times. I learned more from my seven year old daughter in this course than I learned from some of the coursework. Allowing myself to not be the authority and allowing my students to teach me technology has been one of the most rewarding lessons of this course. I learned to branch outside of my comfort zone in teaching, technology and creativity. As a result of this course I assigned a project that I may never have done with my students previously. And, I got some of the best work I have ever received from my students. They actively participated, felt value in what they were learning and are so excited about learning this way that I have extended it as much as I can with assessing them for a formal grade this six weeks. Each of my students will create a “Biome” project using any digital or traditional means that they want, as long as they answer the learning objective questions within their presentation. I have received Biome scrapbooks, videos, power points, research papers, poster boards, and even a Movie Maker movie! This is way better than any cut and paste type of project that I have previously done. As a result, I have changed my viewpoint and attitude about how students learn and their own participation in establishing and creating learning objectives and assessments.