Week 1 Reflections

It's been less than five months since I've given birth to my daughter Hannah and guess what, I'm already back in school! This blog is for reflecting on a technology class that I am taking to earn my teaching certification. I already feel that I am right back in the game of learning and have accomplished quite a bit in this first week, and I have already learned some new skills from this class.

To begin, the class requires that we discuss our readings on a discussion board with other students. A self proclaimed "lurker" on forums, I rarely feel a need to respond to others and often enjoy simply reading what others have to say. This class, however, has required me to step out of that box and post my own threads and respond to others in the class. I now feel like I am getting out of the shyness that I had about communicating on the web. It feels quite good to see when others read your posts and reply to you with their thoughts. There is so much that we can share and learn from each other.

I also had my first online lecture that was complete with media for us to check out. I really enjoyed a couple of the videos that are on Youtube. They spoke volumes about my own educational journey. Basically they were sharing the message that education is rapidly changing and the way that teachers teach and the format that colleges offer classes in has to change along with it. It is because of technology that I am able to attend school right now, just after having a baby. The reason I haven't got my teaching certification before now was simply because classes were not offered in a format that worked with my schedule. Now my goal of becoming a teacher is finally becoming realized through this wonderful thing called technology.

As a part of this course, we are required to purchase and familiarize ourselves with the Nation Educational Technology Standards for Teacher and Students. The booklets contain a number of performance indicators and a range of abilities from beginning to transformative. I have to honest that I haven't really thought about the use of technology before in the classroom since I work with preschool-aged children. However, after looking over the booklets there are a number of things that we could do with the children to pull us out of the beginning range. One performance indicator calls for developing a technology rich environment in the classroom. Some simple things we could do to use technology more effective with the children is to set up the spare computer we have so they could use it become more familiar with keyboards and how to use the mouse. We also have a couple of Smart boards in our library that would be a great resource to use with children.

In all, I'm excited to see where this course takes me. I can already see great things happening with the "Delicious" account I have set up. Organized bookmarks here I come!

Heather