Personal Learning Reflection

Throughout this class I have been introduced to a lot of new types of technology.  Some of which I have heard of but never had the chance to see in action and some that are completely new to me!  I was very excited to take these classes to see what types of new technologies I would come across or technologies I would learn more about to enhance the future of education.

After many of the lessons and throughout all of the SIG presentations, I have been reminded of the importance of technology in education.  Our kids are learning differently than we did, and we need to learn how to teach to this different technological world.  The biggest strategy that I have found within everything in this class is to USE the technology.  Many times we do not use the full potential of technology we may have within our classroom, and it is such a disadvantage to our students.  There is so much to learn about different ways to incorporate technology in our classrooms and much of that information can be found free on the Internet.  I have found the Internet to have countless free resources (some good, some bad) that I need to take more advantage of.  This class has opened my eyes to more of those resources, such as MACULSpace, twitter, and blogs.

One of the new technologies that I have become familiar with and enjoy using is Prezi.  I think this is a fun and easy technology to use within my classes, presentations, and projects, and I found the best way to learn how to use it was to play with it.  I think this was the technology I have become most familiar with throughout this class in the presentation sense, but I know I still have much more to learn and grow within Prezi.  I think that learning Prezi in general, has reached my goal of learning a type of technology that would be useful within my future hybrid classes. 

            Throughout this class, I think our SIG presentation on interactive whiteboards, really exemplifies good teaching with technology particularly in my classroom.  I do use an interactive whiteboard daily, and I think within this presentation, we really exemplified much of the potential of an interactive whiteboard.  We showed everywhere from setting up a “make shift” interactive whiteboard, where to find free lessons, and even videos of students using the interactive whiteboard and active-expressions which I do within my classroom.

Within my personal growth plan, I hoped to find technology that I could incorporate into a face-to-face or hybrid class that I will be teaching in the near future.  I think that this class has really opened my eyes as to the many more technologies that I did not know were so accessible and easy to learn to use.  This class has definitely calmed down much of my nerves as to trying to learn new technologies and ways to incorporate these new technologies in my classroom.

A lot of what I have learned in these past 8 weeks leads me to be interested in pursuing much more information on many of these different types of technologies and find more and more of what I can incorporate into my face to face classes within my school.  My goal is to constantly learn new things and take the challenge to incorporate much of this technology some way in my curriculum.  However, the SIG presentations that peaked my interest and has led me into a direction of further investigating is mobile learning and particularly looking more into the educational resources with an Ipad.  Every new thing I learn, leads me to grow in the technology world in some way, and I hope to continue progressing that knowledge throughout the rest of the program!