Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Final Project-Professional Website & Course Reflection

Link to Website

Reflection

This course overall was a great one because of the practical use that it shows not only in where education is going in the future, but technologies that are already in use today. Having my professional website set up is truly exciting to me because I can edit it to use this year in my classroom. I plan to create a page over the next few weeks that will be dedicated to my classroom. On this page I will include sections for both students and parents and general information about our new personalized learning program. My hope is that both my students and parents will find it very informative. I also plan to work with my team to create a website specifically designed for our program especially since Wix Sites is so user friendly to create.

Another thing that I plan to continue after this course is reflecting in my blog on what I am working on throughout my graduate studies. I have already had comments from friends and coworkers regarding some of my posts that I am really excited about. Several people have mentioned that some of the things I posted about have really been a help and one person even shared my blog on academic search engines with a friend of his. I can definitely see how blogging can help share information about education and if implemented carefully in the classroom, could help students communicate ideas with each other. A huge takeaway from this class for me this year is becoming more creative in ways that students are sharing class information. Why not allow them to create a website, blog, digital image publishing, video presentation or use social media to communicate their final product? In our world of technology, it seems wrong to not encourage our students to learn how to use it educationally.

There is not much that I would change about this class. Although at first it was difficult to understand what was expected, communication between teacher and students was great. I think that after a week or so everyone was pretty much on the same page. At first I was worried about not having a lot of time between units and juggling everything, but found everything we were studying so interesting that it did not seem like much once getting into it. The only suggestion I would have in the future is allowing a little more time at the beginning to get the final project proposal submitted. Maybe by having that due along with the unit 1 deliverables, it would not have made that first week of getting everything set up so stressful. Looking back, however, this was such a small thing that I do not think it matters greatly in the end. Because I would not change much if anything about this course, I cannot think of any real weaknesses. It would be nice to have been able to have class video discussions, but with there being so many people in the class and it being a 100% online class, I am not sure how to go about doing that. Overall this was a great class!

As I already mentioned, the key strengths of this class are the realistic ways in which you can implement the information from the course immediately in the classroom. Sure there was a lot of technology in our readings and discussions that is years in the future, but there is so much that we looked at that can be implemented relatively easily right now. I look forward to experimenting with these technologies throughout this next school year and the rest of my teaching career. The other thing that I really enjoyed with this course was looking into the future of education. While there are many technologies that are still in the beginning stages of understanding how to use them in the classroom, there are so many that are being studied to improve our current teaching methods and benefit our students’ education. As a teacher, it is truly encouraging to know that there are so many great things coming soon to education and I look forward to implementing them with my own students in the fu

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