This course has been a wonderful experience. I thought I was tech savvy when I started this course but I was mistaken. It made me realize that I was an immigrant in the tech world and not a native. In this course I have learned how to blog and create and use a wiki. I am taking another master's program to become a Deacon in the Catholic church and the course I am taking now is requiring us to participate in a wiki. This brought home to me that this course isn't just a course but will be giving me a chance to learn something I will be using in my future classes. If I can use what this course has been teaching me as a student imagine what my students will gain from it. In these last eight weeks I have begun to realise that my students do learn differently from the way I did. I can not teach them in the same manner that I was taught. They have totally different experiences growing up than I did. Their brains are wirded differently than mine was. I have to learn to teach them in a manner that they are familiar with. This course has given me a great start at entering their tech world. I have created a blog, used wikis and have created a lesson that will incorporate the technology we have learned about in my lesson. Hopefully the students will respond to using the technology and it will increase what they retain form the lesson by having them do the work and not just listen to me teach. I have always felt that science is best learned by experiments, unfortunately with budget cuts there are not a lot of materials available to my students. By using the web we will be able to research and possible perform virtual experiments.
I will continue to explore different ways of incorporating the use of wikis and blogs in my teachings as well as looking for more ways to change my style of teaching from teacher centered to students centered. A great way to do this is to join blogs created by teachers for just this purpose. I will be continually scanning the net for blogs and sites that will increase my knowledge of emerging technologies that can help my students.
In the next two years I plan on having a website and a blog dedicated to each of my classes. The all the material that I use in class will be available to the students as well blogs and wikis where the students will participate in projects and be able to ask questions that I can answer as well as other students can put their responses in. This will give the students a chance to participate in the classroom as well as out of the classroom. By creating the website and blog I will be able to overcome the growing numbers of students in my classroom. As my district lays off more teachers the classrooms will get more crowded. The blogs will allow me to reach more students. I will be able to answer questions that students were unwilling or unable to ask during class. I will also be applying for grants so I can make technology more available in my classroom. I realize that fifty percent of my students do not have access to computers at home. If I can give them access to computers in my classroom then I can help solve that problem.
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