When I look over my blog posts it really becomes apparent that I had little knowledge of how to effectively implement the use of technology in my classroom. Even if I had knowledge of a program or website, I was unaware of how to incorporate these ideas into lesson plans to help students learn. What has been very helpful to me is reading other students blogs from this class. Everyone has such creative ideas for how to make this technology useful to us teachers. It is especially helpful to hear from those people in this class that are already teachers. They have specific instances/lesson plans that incorporate technology and are already using them in the classroom! It’s reassuring to know that all we are learning is useful and applicable to my future teaching.
If I had students create a portfolio for one of my classes, I think it might be fun to have the portfolio be an online display of all the work they have done in my class. They could upload all of there documents and include an explanation. As a tool for reflection on my assignments, it might be interesting to have the students write a paragraph or so about how they felt about the assignment; what they did or didn’t like. This could be used for more than just papers, but with Comic Life comics or podcasts too! They would have the freedom to acknowledge the aspects of an assignment they didn’t particularly like. This would help me as a teacher know how the students are feeling and I would be able to change and modify the assignments as necessary for the next school year. I think getting feedback from the students would be very helpful.
I am planning (maybe rather ambitiously) to implement almost every tool we have learned into the classroom at one point or another. I believe that everything we learned could easily be added into an English lesson plan with the result that the student learning would be amplified. Another huge benefit is that with the amount of technology that students use in their daily lives, these additions of technology in the classroom is very relatable to students and they can see how it applies to their lives. This class has really broadened my idea of how to incorporate technology into my classroom and I am very glad to have these blogs to look back on once I become a teacher.
Megan,
ReplyDeleteLike you, I came into this class with little-to-no experience with technologies to use in the classroom, much less ideas for effective implementation for those technologies. I also appreciated looking back over my own blog and other classmates' blogs for ideas.
I also like that you would have your future students write short reflections about the works they put in their portfolio, because it makes putting the portfolio together more of a meaningful activity rather than some pointless exercise. I wrote in my post that I would also have students write a reflection about their portfolio work selections.