CEP 810 Personal Learning Reflection

I have always believed that it is important to teach using technology because it keeps students more interested and involved in what you are teaching and in order to do this, teachers must stay on top of learning the newest forms of technology. This course has taught me about many new forms of technology that can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom and will definitely keep the students engaged.

Not only did I learn about new resources, but I also learned ways that these resources can be used in the classroom. The most beneficial way to use these resources is to teach collaboration. The wide range of web-based technologies from Blogging to Twitter can be used as ways for students to collaborate with each other.

My SIG presentation is the assignment that I feel exemplifies good teaching with technology  because I not only learned more about our group’s topic of using videos in the classroom, but I also learned how to use the program Prezi which can be a very useful tool in the classroom as well.

Because of this class, I have definitely branched out into learning many more technological applications that I did not previously know about and I can now take these new ideas back to my classroom. I now have many ideas to choose from and incorporate into my lessons as opposed to the past when I only knew and used the same few techniques that I used over and over again.

My new goals are to take what I have learned throughout this course and incorporate these new ideas into my classroom lesson plans. My plan for reaching this goal is to stay on top of all the new programs I have learned and to make sure I find ways to incorporate them into my teaching even if it is a little at a time. It would be too difficult to take on the task of incorporating everything I have learned into my teaching all at once, but my long term goal will be to incorporate more and more techniques as time goes on. I would also like to continue my learning in educational technology by taking CEP 812 & CEP 813 next summer.

CEP 811 Personal Learning Reflection

I have always believed that it is important to teach using technology because it keeps students more interested and involved in what you are teaching and in order to do this, teachers must stay on top of learning the newest forms of technology. This course has taught me about many new forms of technology that can be used in a variety of ways in the classroom and will definitely keep the students engaged.

Not only did I learn about new resources, but I also learned ways that these resources can be used in the classroom. The most beneficial way to use these resources is to teach collaboration. The wide range of web-based technologies from Blogging to Wikis can be used as ways for students to collaborate with each other.

Because of this class, I have branched out into learning many more technological applications that I did not previously know about and I can now take these new ideas back to my classroom. I now have many ideas to choose from and incorporate into my lessons as opposed to the past when I used few techniques.

My new goals are to take what I have learned throughout this course and incorporate these new ideas into my classroom lesson plans. My plan for reaching this goal is to stay on top of all the new programs I have learned and to make sure I find ways to incorporate them into my teaching even if it is a little at a time. It would be too difficult to take on the task of incorporating everything I have learned into my teaching all at once, but my long term goal will be to incorporate more and more techniques as time goes on. I would also like to continue my learning in educational technology by taking CEP 812 & CEP 813 next summer.

Online Teaching and Learning

One of the technologies that qualify as an online experience and could be used with my students is Career Cruising (www.careercruising.com) which is under the section of career planning tools. I have actually already used this website with 8^th graders while teaching an exploratory class about careers. In this course we introduced students to many different careers and to exploring their interests and personality traits that would benefit them for certain careers. Career Cruising was a great website to use for this class because it starts out by having students take a personal interest test. After the test was taken, the program would use each student’s results to give them a list of jobs that matched their interests. Finally, students could explore these careers to find out which ones they were interested in. Using Career Cruising, students can compile materials and keep track of their EDPs (Educational Development Plan) online.

The pedagogical strategies that I used with Career Cruising were to have students look over their results from the interest inventory and choose their three top careers from Career Cruising’s generated list. Students would then have to do research about each of the jobs they chose and list the pros and cons of each to eventually choose their top choice that they will complete a report on at the end of the class.

The technologies that would be harder to use with my students are any type of Interactive Discussion like podcasts and video conferencing. I think these would be more difficult to use in my classroom because it would be hard to find time to fit this type of program into a lesson and it would be hard to tie it into the curriculum.

Learning Styles

I have always been a visual learner and as I was growing up in school, I benefitted from my teachers using diagrams, pictures, and videos while teaching. If the teacher was just lecturing or describing the directions to an assignment verbally, I usually wouldn’t grasp the concept completely until I saw an example or diagram of the topic being discussed. Strategies that were less effective were when a teacher would just simply lecture or read from the textbook.

Because we can’t teach each lesson with a focus on every learning style, our focus should be on making sure that we use a variety of lesson plans that teach using each type of learning style. This can be especially useful when teaching about a certain topic for multiple days because then the teacher can take advantage of teaching using many different learning styles on the same topic.

Creative Commons Image

Photo Attribution:Original image: "Layers of color"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/2650613773/

by: Quinn Dombrowski Released under an Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Images in the classroom could be used as visual demonstrations of the topic you are teaching about. For example, if I was teaching about sedimentary rocks and how the layers are effected by things like faulting and folding, I could show the picture above to demonstrate how faulting has caused the layers in the picture to become unaligned.

Link to my Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/65875559@N07/5998339750/