Final Reflection

ETC 447 Blog Phase III: Comprehensive Reflection

The final phase of the Blog reflection is due by the day your class would occur during finals week. You should reread the entries throughout the Blog and the feedback you received from your peers, then reflect on the overall experience. In your final comprehensive reflection you should address all four of the Standards listed below and describe how you did OR would be able to do each of the four elements under each standard: For example, for Standard 1, Item 1, you should provide an example of how you did use technology OR would use technology to promote, support and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness in ways that would facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity.

• Standard 1: Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

1. promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.
2. engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.
3. promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.
4. model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments.

    Technology has amazing ways of encouraging learning and creativity in children, when used correctly. I really enjoyed doing both of these things simultaneously with my first lesson. In this lesson my students were learning about how to use dialogue effectively in their writing. I used an Ipad app called “StoryMaker” and had the students create their own stories, encouraging them to use dialogue frequently as well. This allowed students to really tap into their creativity in creating a unique story about an adventure that Rufus could have, while implementing their knowledge of story writing and dialogue at the same time. This app included pre-made settings, characters, and items that they could include in their stories and also included drawing tools for students to draw their own. This was, in my opinion, a perfect balance of structure and creativity. It gave students some ideas, but also gave them tools to make something completely new. This is GREAT for differentiated instruction because some students will thrive off of complete freedom for their story, while others might need some promptings and pre-made images. That is okay, either way, and allows students to differentiate for themselves.

• Standard 2: Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments

1. design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.
2. develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to pursue their individual curiosities and become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress.
3. customize and personalize learning activities to address students' diverse learning styles, working strategies, and abilities using digital tools and resources.
4. provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching.

    Throughout my development of lessons I came to experience a variety of types of technology programs that allowed my students to learn and experience knowledge in completely new ways. In my second lesson, in which I taught my students about the skeletal system, I provided a wide variety of programs for students to work on, so that they could learn the bones of the body in different ways. I found websites with programs where students could match the name to the bone and where they could construct the skeleton themselves. I do wish I could have found more programs with more variety. I’m not really sure what else there could be, but I would love to figure out a more creative and meaningful way to teach about the skeletal system. With more time and research, I feel like I could improve this unit to make it more meaningful, engaging, and inspire creativity. I want my students’ experiences with this unit to be more meaningful and inspire learning.

    One thing I would really like to improve is creating meaningful and informative assessments using technology. I used the books created on StoryMaker for the first lesson’s assessment, however, there were some difficulties with saving the stories and sending them to me (the teacher) for assessing. In the future my technology assessments would have to be much more reliable and simple to send. In my second lesson I only used technology for a pre-assessment, but not a post-assessment. I would like to learn more about technology assessments in the future.

• Standard 3: Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

1. demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations.
2. collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.
3. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.
4. model and facilitate effective use of current and emerging digital tools to locate, analyze, evaluate, and use information resources to support research and learning.

    In this day and age it is so important for students to be incredibly computer literate. This is why it is as important to teach students computer skills as academic skills. Almost every job, nowadays requires some amount of technological competency, so that is why I personally will be teaching my students computer skills. In the lessons that I taught during this class, I did not use technology in a very accessible way. I used programs, websites, and applications to enhance student learning, but I did not teach them as many useful technology skills, that they could implement in their lives. By useful computer skills, I mean things like; teaching students how to research on the internet, teaching typing skills, or how to use Microsoft Word. These are all basic skills that the students will most likely need to know how to use in the future. In a future lessons I would try to implement one basic skill per technology lesson.

• Standard 4: Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility

1. advocate, model, and teach safe, legal, and ethical use of digital information and technology, including respect for copyright, intellectual property, and the appropriate documentation of sources.
2. address the diverse needs of all learners by using learner-centered strategies providing equitable access to appropriate digital tools and resources.
3. promote and model digital etiquette and responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.
4. develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.

    Unfortunately this would be the area that I would say I lacked the most. I did not implement as many aspects of Global Digital Citizenship as I should have. I believe that the best way to teach students how to be safe and kind on the internet is to make it a normal part of every technology lesson. I want to integrate aspects of Global Digital Citizenship into every technology lesson. For example, when I am allowing students to research online, we talk about how we should never give out personal information online unless we ask our parents about it and they think it is alright (for example, purchasing something on Amazon). Or if we are talking about social media, we converse about not accepting people you don’t know as your friends, and the importance of not using the internet to bully others (cyberbullying). There are little moments in each lesson where there is an opportunity to teach or remind students of some aspect of digital citizenship and I want to take advantage of every moment.