Educ 6710 Reflective Essay

 

Through this course I have gained a vast amount of educational web 2.0 tools to use in the classroom.  The resources and activities provided have helped me to enrich my technological practices and refreshed the way that I present content. As Richardson states, “the teacher’s role must and will change and that schools themselves must embrace different culture and outcomes to effectively prepare students for what the future holds” (Richardson, 2015). I believe that this course has allowed me to do that. The most useful for me was the Wiki page with embedded assignments for students. I have started using this in my classroom and will continue.

         I have deepened my knowledge of teaching and learning with technology by leveraging its usefulness alongside traditional curricular instruction. In creating the wiki I was able to insert my podcast where I as well as charts that I use in traditional classroom instruction, thereby creating a technological and content rich environment for students. Moving forward I could certainly see myself applying the use of the class blog, twitter and resource databases that I learned to create. I find that these tools assist in helping me to apply the knowledge of skills that I am using to facilitate my 21^st century classroom. I believe that my educational approach to technology most closely relates to, “Technology Proficiency 3a, “The candidate communicates relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and colleagues using a variety of digital age media and formats to improve and/or enhance student learning” with the growth of web 2.0 it has become even easier to enhance the classroom through the world wide web. One web 2.0 tool that I am interested in continuing to use is the class twitter account.

     I really enjoyed searching on twitter for the current and past class hangtags for our class, this reminds me of cohort style education, and I think that this could increase student engagement and be interesting for different years of students to participate in. However, one roadblock that I fear may impede this is the lack of school support behind utilizing social media. This has been a setback for many educators, some even facing repercussions for using this tool in the classroom. However, I note that this tool aligns with ISTE 2.2 as they allow students to share their ideas with the use of technology (ISTE,2016) and also ISTE 1.6 as students can work through collaboration (ISTE,2016).

        One S.M.A.R.T goal that I have developed is: by June 2023 I would like to both teach and utilize a class wiki page, where through practice 100% of students are able to both navigate the page, analyze the content and contribute to it. Through creating engaging online lessons while also monitoring and providing quality feedback to students I hope to support Robert Gagnes “9 events of instruction” as I push students towards mastery of content (Gagne, 2017).

The second S.M.A.R.T goal that I have developed is: For the 2023-2024 school year I plan to engage 100% of my students in the web 2.0 tool of twitter . I plan to teach students to interact and collaborate safely in the online community as they also build content skills and knowledge.

    I believe that both of these goals will serve to better prepare students for the 21^st society and workplace because, as Richardson agrees, the educator role has evolved due to technology and will continue to prepare students for future career readiness (Richardson, 2015). As a teacher I plan to accomplish these goals by first educating my administration in an effort to get them on board with using social media accounts in education. I plan to present the data from the text, Time to Update the Program: Reimagining School with Will Richardson and also present the twitter account that myself and other students from this class have created to try to positively influence their decision. Secondly, I plan to invest families and other stakeholders by educating them on this data and asking for parent permission for students to participate. I believe that there is a stigma regarding collaborative technology such as social media in education. Within my district there is currently a no individual class social media policy where each school may have and operate one account that represents their district page. These accounts are given specific formats and topics for each school to uniformly post. This poses both a challenge to me but is also something that I would like to study and help them to adjust. It is my hope that this program will enable me to enlighten my school district to develop a greater and more data based approach to incorporating Web 2.0 and social media tools in education.

 

 

 

                                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                     Resources

Hilley, M. (2018). Time to Update the Program: Reimagining School with Will Richardson. International Educator, 32(3), 10–32.

 

‌International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2016a). ISTE Standards for Students. https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-students

Robert Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. ( Gagne, 2017).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twzCxTLfls4

Walden University. (n.d.). Technology Proficiencies. RWOTOEL Technology proficiencies. Retrieved from https://content.waldenu.edu/2565b7a77954cee53d16c82a78cc0726.pdf

 

Richardson, W. (2015). From master teacher to master learner. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press, 5-14.