Throughout my time spent in Education 2325, there are two personal
goals that I hope to achieve. My first goal is based around digital
technology integration into the classroom. After this class I hope to learn
ways and methods to successfully integrate technology into my classroom in
order to help scaffold my teaching. Even though I have grown up as a student in
the 21st century and am transitioning into the role of an educator, I find that
I am very "old school" in terms of technology. Therefore I am hoping
to learn about different mediums to technology that not only enhance my
teaching but also help enrich student learning in order to create a more
authentic understand. However I believe that although technology can greatly
enhance education, it is not a substitute for good teaching. Thus I think that
it is important to find a balance between instruction and the use of digital
technology.
My second goal branches off of my second goal, in which I truly
believe that digital technology, can help to create a more authentic learning
experience. As a teacher, I have become very interested in inquiry-based
learning and more specifically in terms of science. Thus, by the end of this
course I am hoping to learn what are some successful mediums of digital
technology that I can bring into a classroom in order to launch inquiry
projects and deeper levels of thinking among my students. I have also chosen
this as my research topic for this and am excited to dig into the topic to
learn more! This is an important topic to me because I believe in
learning through "doing" and I also believe in authenticity. In my
personal opinion, students each have there own meaning of what learning is to
them and within this meaning they each have developed an idea of what is
important to them and what they want to learn. I believe that through inquiry
learning both of these principles can be achieved. Inquiry allows students to
not only learn curriculum objects but it applies them to real life situation
thus creating authenticity. Inquiry also allows students to branch off
curricular outcomes into topics that are meaningful to each individual.
In terms of my past educational experience with technology I have
been privileged to use a variety of different mediums such as laptops,
Smartboards, and Iclickers. Yet I feel that the technology was just “there” and
it serve as a point of delivery for information. Where as now from a future
teacher’s perspective, there is so many ways that the technology above could
have been used to deliver a more rich understanding of learning. Therefore I hope to use technology to help
take my students from ordinary to extraordinary!
