A Time of Reflection

As the semester (and this class) comes to a close, I thought I’d reflect on the goals I set forth for myself (in this earlier post) and how I think I’ve done so far with them.

1. Use technology to empower students and encourage creativity –  My Goal: Give students a choice and provide opportunities for creativity by allowing and encouraging the use of technology to demonstrate learning.
2. Use technology to connect students to new concepts – My Goal: Use digital resources to help students make connections to new concepts and to engage students in their learning.

While I have not given my students a choice just yet, mainly because I am still learning what kinds of choices I can offer them, I feel that I am on the verge of allowing students to use creativity and use technology to help them connect to the concepts they’ve learned.  And, I have this class to thank for that.  The culminating project, which was a digital storytelling project created for my Algebra 1 Honors class, will allow my students to write, model, and solve real-world problems and then tell the story of how they accomplished that.  In doing so, they will use the Internet, online graphing calculators, and Prezi.  Additionally, they will use creativity in writing their own real-world problems and in creating their digital presentations.   I am really excited about working to meet this goal in the near future.  This project (its “wiki” page and web resource and Prezi for telling their story) serves as way to help me meet my second goal of having students use digital resources to help students to connect to the learning.

This class and this project “forced” me to use the tools I was learning and, as a result, allowed me to start meeting the goals I set for myself.  Additionally, I feel much more knowledgeable about the tools that are available to me and my students.  Never in my life did I think I’d be blogging and tweeting, creating a wiki page, creating a curriculum/resource page, creating a digit project for my students, creating rubrics online, learning to embed videos and presentations, learning to create Prezi’s, learning that attribution must be given for images and learning to do that correctly, reading weekly news articles on e-learning and educational technology to stay knowledgeable on the topic, reading and writing about research, writing reflections of my learning activities, and so much more. Whew!

It’s been a great class.  I’ve learned a lot.  And, I look forward to learning more and to slowing but surely integrate more and more technology and tools into my classroom.  I know that in doing so, I will be enhancing the learning experiences of my students and even helping myself to be a more efficient and effective teacher.

Thanks, K. Thompson and  EME5050!