Week 5

As I started this course 5 weeks ago, I started to really think about how technology was used in our schools, what was really offered to all teachers, and how technology was really perceived in our schools. I have always thought that technology was a strength of mine, being that I have only been out of school for three years. I quickly realized that this was not as true as I thought; I took the pre evaluation and realized that I had to answer low on most questions. The problem was that I have heard of most things; however I was not sure how to actually do any of the things. After realizing this, I envisioned myself being much more tech savvy by the end of this course. I would say that now that the course is coming to an end, I can say that I am much more tech savvy then before. I had never created a blog before, so I was actually really interested to learn how blogs work. I have already read blogs, but never had my own. I feel that I did achieve what I envisioned because I went outside of my comfort zone with it comes to technology, and was successful.

Now that I understand blogs and how to post power points, I feel that I can take this back to my own classroom. For example my campus requires that all teachers maintain a website. On this website you must post worksheets and notes that you do each day in your classroom. When I have done power points in the past, I have never liked just attaching the file, so now that I know I can convert the power pint so that it plays on my website; I feel that my student’s will benefit from that resource when they are absent. I have already started doing this on my school website.

Throughout this course I found myself constantly learning more about myself. I again thought I knew a lot about technology and thought that I was using it effectively in my classroom. I am using it all the time, but this class has made me realize that I need to look at the class from the eyes of the students, what do they feel comfortable with and using, what is hard for them, what do I think will be most effective for them. At times, I think we get caught up in how innovate this technology will look from the outside, and we don’t think about the user friendliness of the tools and how they really help. I know understand why the student’s are so reluctant to the textbooks and even the homework papers, they do not use books, even books that they want to read can be found on the computer ( kindles) and paper is not something they use as much, all notes and reminders can be types into your phone, computer or some other devise.

This leads to me to blogging. I find myself reading random blogs on the internet all the time to try to read thoughts and opinions on topics, so after this course I realized why wouldn’t’ a blog in a classroom help my students in the same way. If I had a class blog, students could read my lesson notes from home at any time, they could read announcements, comments about my thoughts about the day. Student’s sit on the computer at night, so this would be helpful to keep the student’s up to date and involved. I was not sure how to use a blog period till this class, much less how to incorporate this into my classroom. Now, I do see the positive side of this, however I do see the negative side of blogging. I feel that if we do not monitor blogs, provide security for blogs and set limitations on blogs that we could have many issues from the standpoint of an administrator. As an administrator it is important to make sure that we set guidelines, monitor blogs and know what is really out on our teachers’ websites, and blogs. The more freedom and technology we allow the more legal issues you can face.

As an administrator it is also important to make sure that I communicate with my community and stakeholders in our community. With a blog for the school, we can educate our stakeholders on what is going on in our school on a daily basis. With live blogs each day, we can put emotions and thoughts in to our communication. We can put instant results, information, reports, data and messages out to our community within seconds. Again, I think it is important to make sure you have a certain security feature so that those who do not need to know every detail of our school are not checking up on them when they are not suppose to.

All in all, this class has opened my eyes to the extent of which technology can reach our students and the effect that technology can have in our schools.