Reflective Blog #8

One Aha moment that I had was that if I would have taken this class first, Integrating Technology into the Curriculum would have been a breeze. LOL. On a more serious note I see that learning these different technological skills effectively has an enormous impact on how well our students can comprehend what we are teaching them. This is especially true for students who are in low economic areas where their only exposure to technology is what they get at school. I think we owe it to them to prepare them with as much as possible while they are at school. How can we prepare them them as much as possible while being at school? We can better prepare ourselves by getting as much out of training as possible and by taking courses such as this one and integrating the information we learn every chance we get. Thanks for the opportunity to being exposed to such valuable instruction.

Reflective Blog #4

The tenet that I focused on for assessing learning was Learners should receive constructive guidance about how to improve. I focused on this one because all to often we as educators are given one day of training on how to implement IFL strategies or new math programs and are expected to implement it perfectly to our students. This is nearly impossible if you still have questions about the subject that your teaching or if the person who is demostrating the new program has never taught with it themselves. This is something that is all to common in some districts and is a practice that needs to be changed.

The portfolio will allow me to examine where I started at to the point of where I am going. The development of the portfolio is a vehicle in which one can use to gain understanding about the progress one has made throughout an ordeal. It allows you to go back and look at what you initially accomplished as a result of instruction and analyze the improvements that can be made overtime. Also it will motivate me to be more creative with my use of technology with my students.

Reflective Blog #7

The learning objective that I developed pertained to students using Our Story to create a timeline using photos about some element of their lives. Once the students have added all the photos that they wanted to the timeline, they would then upload the timeline to their very own blog . Then they would need to comment specifically about some of the pictures featured in their timeline. My rationale for selecting the technologies that I did was because I felt that students need to be able to write daily. In order to accomplish this the writing has to be meaningful to them in order for them to be engaged in writing. The Blog assists with this task. Also the earlier that students become acquainted with writing the better they will be at doing it when they become our age. Furthermore, by them compiling their memories into a timeline the students can always have a record of their lives that can be shielded from lost, theft, or natural disasters.
My expectations for the learning outcome is that each student will take the knowledge from the activity and build on it. Use these sites to incorporate them into their lives daily not just to meet the course requirements.
I feel that the objective that I have created has the ability to span across all age groups and can change how some even view the use of technology.