Final+Assessment

Respond in the expandable boxes below. Remember to copy and paste your responses to your wiki. 1. What outcomes had you envisioned for this course? Did you achieve those outcomes? Did the actual course outcomes align with those that you envisioned? When I first read the title of the course, I knew it would be something I that would catch my interest. Obviously, since we have signed up for this class and degree, we all enjoy and see the benefits of using technology in the classroom. I expected the class to include several ways to integrate technology into the content areas we teach. I hoped to gain new knowledge of how to use technology more effectively in teaching. By the end of the course, I also hoped to be comfortable with new technology geared lessons to take and share with the teachers I work with. Lastly, once learning we would be once again working in a group, I hoped to gain better skills working with collaborative software. Long distance communication has grown tremendous over the last few years and it is difficult to keep up with the latest ways to correspond using the internet. 2. To the extent that you achived the outcomes, are they still relevant to the work that you do in your school? Why or why not? Teaching with technology has become more than just relevant; it is now a necessity that teachers are faced with everyday. Students are going to be expected to not only use technology in the work place, they will be interviewing for jobs over skipe, collaborating with co-workers across the globe, and share files seamlessly and quickly over the internet. It is hard to see how teaching with technology is not relevant to being a classroom teacher today. There are several applications I became familiar with in this course that I plan to use with my students. I especially liked the idea of an effort spreadsheet to show students the coloration between putting forth effort and achievement. Also, a Google doc is a fantastic way for students and teachers to share documents and files without crowding email and waiting for files to upload or download. I am pleased that there are many usefully and relevant resources I will be taking to the classroom with me. 3. What outcomes did you not achieve? What prevented you from achieving them? Of all the outcomes I had envision, the one that I feel I did not achieve was designing professional development activities to share my learning. I wanted to be able to help my colleges at the end of the course. The most difficult task my group had was adding professional development to our plan for the given scenario. We were not sure what exactly was expected for us to include in the Google Site. We felt frantic at this past week, because we realized we did not have a well-developed professional development piece is our solution. Since this last week is cut short, I feel a few more days to focus and brain storm in this activity we could have produced a stronger overall project. I am sure the professor left the guidelines open for the profession development piece so that we would be more free to come up with our own ideas. As we all know with our students, this can sometimes cause a roadblock. Unfortunately, I was not pleased with our professional development section of our plan. 4. Were you successful in completing the course assignments? If not, what prevented or discouraged you? I was able to complete all course assignments, but there were a few that I felt less successful on than others. After spending literally hours on my UDL book, I still felt I had not produce a quality piece of work. Part of this could be because I tried to create a fiction story to go along with my science activity in my UDL lesson. I am not much of a writer and spend a lot of time trying to make my story appealing to children. It also took quite a while looking for images to go with my book. In hindsight, I wish I would have spent more time working with the coaches and giving the students tips and ways to better understand the story. In the end, I was not proud of my work. It did not feel complete. I wish I had more time to spend tweaking and improving the roles of the coaches. I guess starting with a non-fiction book, or using previously written text, would have freed up more time to develop the coaches and make my book a more powerful tool for the students. 5. What did you learn from this course: about yourself, your technology and leadership skills, and your attitudes? One of the important attributes to being a leader of any kind is being able to work collaboratively with others. In this course I felt successful in the way my team and I have compromised and worked together to produce the entire Google Site and Doc from scratch. Many of us had to come up with lessons and book topics outside of our own grade levels and TEKS we comfortable with. Without being able to get together and plan our project we each had our own ideas of how to solve the scenario given. Sometimes one of the team members would give an idea that was different from my own. It was not always easy to see where they were coming from, but I feel we worked very well together and questioned and pushed each other’s ideas to make sure we understood one another. I am also always amazing at how we are able to get some much done and accomplished such as short amount of time. It just shows how outstanding technology can be in allowing people to work together without being face to face.
 * Course Reflection Prompts **