In my Personal Growth Plan, I expressed a
basic desire to advance my knowledge in technologies and skills to promote
myself in the higher educational support field. In the context of this course,
I have been able to experience new technologies, new methods of collaboration
and opportunities to continue to work on my writing both educationally and personally.
I feel that these experiences have ultimately furthered my ambitions for this
course.
Most of the content pertaining
to teaching, instructional design and learning styles was a useful first exposure.
I had taken an integrated science for education majors’ course, but that class focused
less on learning styles verse age groups, mainly focusing on younger students.
Lesson content was not a new concept to me, my mother was a teacher, I grew up
watching her draft lesson plans. But the way to create lesson plans to be
effective and efficient is something I had previously ignored. I think a
different view of this experience is how I applied education to my use of
technology, which was in truth a hope of mine.
As a technologist
and not an educator (at least not right now), my evaluation of "good teaching with technology" are about my personal experience in this course. Even though I did
not really turn in the “learning” assignments, I did find the lectures
particularly interesting in how they were seemingly a collaborative effort. I
noticed that some of the authors of the lectures were written by different instructors.
I thought this was a great method of “mixing up” the lectures providing new and
different approaches to the online lecturing experience. The
group assignment was a good opportunity to experience some new communication technologies.
We tried a couple systems and ended up Skyping to hash out our idea, and a wiki
to put it together, it seemed “seamless” and very efficient. Another group of assignments I felt helped me
reach my intentions with this course are the personal writing opportunities
such as blogs and reflections.
Another interesting
aspect was some personal and professional experiences
that have worked to further my educational goals. The timing of my encouragement
to familiarize myself with web 2.0 content has exposed me to information that I
have found very interesting (outside side of education) and also allowed me the
opportunity to start writing on content which motivated me to express myself in
writing in an extracurricular activity (a contribution to local news). Also during
this course I had a couple interviews and in after review of my professional goals,
it was made clear that I would be expected to have experience teaching, if I
want to aspire to management in higher education.
In reflection and establishing new goals, I
found I will want to continue to work on my current goals; they were set with
long terms in mind, but added to them are two goals. One is to pursue opportunities
to practice my writing in motivated venue, whether class assignment, personal blogging,
or opportunities at work. The other new goal is to further my opportunities to
be an educator, which may involve pursuing a teaching certificate.
We spent last summer creating the modules in the sessions. We spent a lot of time on them and we just came together last Thursday to talk about them and making some changes. This class has to be changing all the time as well as 811 and 812. We cannot let the content get stagnant. Plus after year teaching the new content, we need to make some changes especially after getting input from our students taking the courses.
ReplyDeleteI think this course will expand your knowledge in your present position and will help you grow!