Final Blog Entry for ED Tech 541

 Part One:  This is a course reflection blog post.
   I am enrolled in the EdD in Educational Technology and am in the cohort beginning Fall Semester 2015.  I took this course as an elective to meet my elective requirement.  I chose this course because it was in line with my interest and with the technology initiative that is already taking place in the school system where I teach.  I am on the Couny-wide Digital Learning Steering Committee and was hoping to gain some expertise in the area of integrating technology in the classroom.

I have learned a significant amount about the theory and practice of integrating technology in the classroom.  I think I learned as much or more from my colleagues in the course as I did from the text.  I found their feedback helpful.  I am a little shamed to admit that I learned a lot about blogging and putting together a website.  While I have used these tools, I have apparently not been using them to their fullest extent.  I had not used the embed feature before.  Now I can see that it is a much cleaner and neater way to put resources on a website.

I have grown professionally in the resources I now have to engage other teachers in the process of integrating technology.  I believe that I am better positioned to exercise leadership for the next school year with the county 1:1 initiative.

My thoughts about teaching and my teaching practice have been impacted in that I have developed a better understanding of the purpose of technology in the physics classroom.  I can see that my use of technology up to this point has been effective and that by employing some of the ideas I have gained in this course I will be able to make significant improvements in my teaching strategy.

Starting by considering constructivist vs. behaviorist  thinking as it applies to physics and educational technology really struck a chord with me.  Having a background in psychology, I was interested in the fact that ways of learning and ways of teaching necessarily have a technology component.  In each of my assignments I was always trying to start with what I believed to be true and then challenging myself to write about something slightly outside of what I believed.  The structure of the course encouraged me to try to think in more divergent ways about my practice.

 


Part Two:  My assessment on my Blog Performance