Final Blog

1.     My understandings of the standards changed when designing lessons particularly when thinking about Standard 1, facilitating and inspiring student learning and creativity. It’s easy to think of things for the students to do in class that will cover the standards, but it’s quite a challenge when thinking about less direct instruction, and more facilitating the learning process. I also changed understandings of standard 2, design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments, because it was very difficult to find ways of integrating technology into my lessons, without it seeming forced, or out of place. My last lesson, however, I was successfully able to incorporate digital-age assessments into my lesson.

a.      When Teaching the lessons, I was able to apply standard 3, modeling digital-age work and learning, by physically modeling the different technology tools within my lesson. It required me to go step-by-step with the students, and really focusing on what they needed to do in order to succeed.

b.      When assessing peer artifacts, I was able to use standard 4, promoting and modeling digital citizenship and responsibility, by making sure that the students (my peers) were following the Internet’s “code of ethics”.

2.     From my peer’s feedback, I have learned that it is always useful to try out experiments more than once before executing the lesson in front of students. For example, we had some trouble getting some of the film canisters to work when doing our Alka Seltzer experiment, which proved to be more difficult to get accurate data when only one test subject was used, instead of 3.

• From my peer’s lessons, I have learned that it is quite difficult for most people to apply standard 1, facilitating and inspiring student learning and creativity, to lessons without extensive background knowledge in the subject. Some of my peers were naturals at facilitating and inspiring student learning and creativity; for example, when Taryn let us create our own book on the ipads that could be anything we wanted, as long as it had to do with pumpkins. Other peers focused on making lessons “fun” but focused on jazzed-up rote memorization as opposed to inspiring creativity. This has definitely made me think about my own lessons, and how I can better apply them to Standard 1.

3.     My experiences in this class have broadened my view on my own teaching practices. This class, coupled with my practicum experiences, has made me into a better-informed teacher. I feel better prepared to facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity. This class wasn’t just teaching us about the different technologies that exist in this day in age, but gave us practical experience in using technology as a tool, and as a part of the daily classroom environment. I think the most important concept I got out of this class was from standard 2, designing and developing digital-age learning experiences and assessments. This one was tricky because many lessons don’t easily lend themselves to a technology component. This helped me realize that, when you use technology as part of your assessment, it actually allows teachers to individualize assessments much more, by having the opportunity to talk to each student about what they have learned. In this class, we also learned about modeling digital-age work and learning. This one was particularly fun, because we were allowed the freedom to explore the different apps and toys that surround us, in order to better our technology brains, so to speak. With standard 4, promoting and modeling digital citizenship and responsibility, I feel like standard 4 was one of the underlying themes throughout the entire class, not just from a particular assignment. We were always expected to conduct ourselves in a way that was considered appropriate, including no plagiarism or other forms of indecency. Because this was already practiced on a weekly basis, I feel that it will be even easier to explain and enforce to my students.