Ordinary to Extraordinary

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!