Final Reflection for Educ 6711

At the start of this class, I was a teacher that thought that technologies should be used in many different areas of the classroom. I believed that students learn best when they are exposed to a problem, and they are given the means to research that problem and learn more about it. I have always thought the best way to do this was provide the students with the technology in the classroom that will help them solve the problems.

This class really did not change much of that theory of learning, but it did strengthen it quite a bit. Learning about all the different learning theories and how we can use technology to address them has really made me think of new and exciting ways to teach my students. To begin this class, I only knew quite a bit about behaviorism, because that is something I think is used in classrooms quite often. Behaviorism “emphasize changes in behavior that result from stimulus-response associations made by the learner” (Standridge, 2002). As teachers, this is one area that I believe most of us use in our teaching. I think of the idea of homework. When a student would do well on an assignment, we tell that student good job by either actually telling the student, or giving the student a good grade. This reinforces this behavior of working hard on homework for good grades. I have learned more though about other learning theories. For example, one area that I have always thought it important to teach students is through the use of collaborative learning. “Cooperative learning is defined as students working together to attain group goals that cannot be obtained by working alone or competitively" (Palmer, Peters, & Streetman, 2003). This is where my understanding of technology and how it can be used in the classroom grew the most.

Being presented with technologies such as Voicethread, Google Documents, and other collaborative tools gave me a whole new arsenal of tools to help my students learn. I am especially excited about the collaborative effects that I hope Google Documents will have. I realize we did not learn specifically about Google Documents in this class, but trying to learn more about Voicethread had me learning more about other tools as well.

One of the immediate changes I am going to make to my instructional methods is try to use programs like Google Documents a lot more. In science, I tend to do a lot of group work, but we are always slowed down by the time it takes to have the students copy each others parts of their project. For example, when doing a research project, and the students divided up the different planets they were going to learn about. Using Google Documents will help me speed that up quite a bit because when the students are done, they are going to be able to just hit the print button.

Another change I am going to make immediately is to find new ways to get the students to use my interactive whiteboard. This has been a goal of mine for a while, but having been presented with some new ways to already use it, I am excited about giving it another try.

The two goals I would like to make are the goals I have listed above. The second one will not be as complicated to complete as the first. For the second one, I know that one of my goals is going to be to try and get all my students up to the board at least once a month to start. In the past, I have tried to get each student up there once a quarter, but I would like to increase that number. One way that I have been able to get the students up there in the past is through the use of correcting math assignments. When I have a little time, and a student has a question, I will usually give a student who got the answer correct the option of coming to the board to show and talk their class through the problem. In science, we have completed things such as food webs and food chains and those are great ways to get them to the board.

As far as my first goal, the reason that is going to be tricky is all the students need to have a Google account. I will need to go to the board at my school and ask permission from them to make my students sign up for it, and then I will need to convince parents that this will benefit the students enough that it is worth it. Once I have gained permission from those that I need to, I will be able to have the students sign up. I am going to require them to turn in their username and passwords to me so they do not start using these as personal email addresses. I believe that will help with them using these in appropriate ways only. As far as using Google Documents more in the classroom, I am planning on using it with a collaborative setting. The students can all have a file they are editing with notes open and as they add their edits to the paper, the edits show up on all the students in their group. This will work well for students that do not have computers good enough to run applications such as Voicethread. As far as group work within Google Documents, it is similar to Voicethread in that I can have the students work in specific groups and only see what their group is doing.

Overall, I have learned a lot from this course. I have really enjoyed delving more into the different ways that we as educators can use technology in ways to create more meaningful and better learning opportunities for our students. I am excited about trying technologies such as Voicethread, Kikutext, Google Documents, or Edmodo in my classroom.

References

Palmer, G., Peters, R., & Streetman, R. (2003). Cooperative learning. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved June 18, 2012, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Standridge, M.. (2002). Behaviorism. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved June, 18, 2012, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/