While looking back at my most recent Walden course, EDUC 6710-Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society, I am amazed at how my understanding of how technology should be used in the classroom.
I am much more aware of what technology (especially web 2.0) is available to me as a teaching professional, and have gained a new understanding of how these technologies work. I am now confident in my ability to produce a wiki myself, and am determined to develop this skill so that I am able to aid my students in developing their own wikis. I think that the wiki, like the blog, could be a valuable teaching tool in my classroom, though it will require a lot of preparation to ensure this is true.
I now understand that technology needs to help us do different things, not do the same old things, just in a different way. The blog, for example, could be simply a way for kids to journal, like they do now, or it could be a way for students to post their work for editing comments and revision before it is submitted as a final product in a portfolio. Due to the abundance of technology, the skills needed, and the subsequent learning which is optimized, teachers in technology-rich classrooms should be more facilitators than directors. It is my job, as the facilitating teacher, to help my students gain the skills they need to use technology to learn things they find interesting and important. Due to the internet, students have much more knowledge at their fingertips. They no longer need to practice rote memorization of facts, because they can easily find these facts online. Instead, I need to teach my students how to apply this information in ways that help them to understand the world around them, and cause positive change in their own lives. In other words, for the first time in history, teachers need to teach students to be free-thinkers, or come to their own conclusions about information, not just follow the knowledge of the people who came before. This idea will revolutionize education, once teachers stop being afraid that they will educate themselves out of a job. Technology will never replace teachers, but it will, hopefully, make their lives better.
I want to continue down this track of learning how to incorporate technology into my classroom to increase student achievement. For this reason, I have agreed to become grade level chair next school year so that I can help to incorporate more technology in all of the classrooms, and attend trainings on new technology which is being offered to our school. In the next two years, I would like to make my classroom “almost paperless”. I teach first grade, and believe that my students need to learn the technology skills necessary to compete in the global economy, yet, I think that they are still first graders who need to learn how to form letters, paint, draw, use chalk and pastels, and participate in group art projects. Other than for these activities, though, I would like to make my classroom paperless, meaning that the students complete projects only on computers, and submit them electronically. I think that this will be a huge challenge to implement because my school believes very strongly that the old ways worked fine, so I will have to find grants to supply the needed technology, and present my idea with the monetary backing already in place. I would love to be able to watch my students work through their centers, and while they use the manipulatives to find answers to math problems for example, record their findings on a tablet, and have their documentation saved, and possibly emailed to the parents to show them how much learning their child is gaining every day! This is a very large goal, so I have broken it down into two smaller milestones. I will need to find grants which will supply the needed money, which means I will have to produce a number of technology projects in the coming year to provide examples of how I plan to incorporate this idea into my classroom. First I will have my students make an online portfolio through Weebly (an online web-page hosting program). This way my students can show all of their technology work in one safe format, and parents can view student progress throughout the school year. Secondly, I will use my classroom computers, and the tech lab as much as possible to help the students create, create, create! I already have in place a breadth of projects for my students, I will just need to show how consistently I implement technology in my classroom, and my plans to do even more in the future.
When I started this course I understood how important technology was in schools, and had a vague thought in my mind that I would like to produce a “paperless” classroom. Now, I have a clear vision of what I want my classroom to look like in two years, and I will work tirelessly to achieve it.
