The main take-away I hoped to have following CEP 810, included in the Personal Growth Plan I created during the beginning of the course, was how to use technology effectively, or how to use technology to enhance my current and future students knowledge and understanding of new concepts. The TPACK lecture and readings during week 4, as well as learning about 21st century skills, the ISTE and NETS Standards during week 6 have helped me to analyze whether I am currently teaching for understanding with technology, as well as provide me with a template for contemplating how I can be sure I am effectively using technology with future students.
Several of the explicit goals I created in my Personal Growth Plan included sharing and discussing my learning in the course with others, specifically with my mentor teacher and fellow deaf education interns. I have shared ideas and activities I can use with my current group of students, discovered through the numerous Blogs and Delicious Stacks I now follow with my mentor teacher. In addition, I created a Google Docs to collaborate with fellow interns on the creation of a presentation for our seminar.
My other goals included increasing my technology skills, specifically through spending time using technology and creating an on-going list of questions regarding new technologies and spending time discovering answers to those questions each week. Reflecting on the products I have following the course I feel that I have increased my skills in using a variety of technologies, from Google Reader, Blogs, Google Calendars, Twitter, LinkedIn, MACUL Space, social bookmarking tools, Creative Commons and more. Before beginning CEP 810 I knew about a large number of technologies available and how to use some of them in general, however, I did not actually use many myself. Throughout the course, I have used Google Docs and Skype to effectively work with a group of 3 other individuals to create a professional presentation. I am now using a social bookmarking tool, Delicious to find and organize ideas for a unit plan I have to create as part of my internship. I have shared my knowledge through MACUL Space, and obtained new knowledge and ideas regarding the use of technology in education through my Google Reader page, Blogs I follow, Twitter, LinkedIn, MACUL Space, and Delicious. Of course, CEP 810 has also introduced me to new technology that I need to continue to explore, those being items introduced to me during week 7 of the course: Popplet, mobile-learning, and cloud computing.
Although, I have accomplished several goals over the course of 8 weeks, I obviously can’t stop here. One of my goals for the future is to continue to use technology standards, such as the ISTE and NETS Standards to guide my teaching. In coalition with my Personal Technology Plan, I have the goal of continuing to learn about effectively using technology in education from websites that I subscribe to through my Google Reader page, Blogs I follow, and Twitter, as well as consider how I will use technology that I learn about with different groups of students. My career-long goal is to forever evaluate how I use technology in education, ensuring that my students always have opportunities to explore technology and create new things using technology.
