Blogfolio

Before taking IT365 I considered myself pretty tech-savvy.  However, I had never thought about how to apply what I know about technology to my future career as an educator.  This class has made me realize that there is so much technology available to inspire learning; you just need to be creative when thinking of the end goal and how to achieve that goal.  Creativity is definitely my weak point.  It is not that I am not a creative person; it is more that I have little faith in my creativity and I always feel like my ideas are not good enough.  After completing some of the more creative assignments, such as the concept map, I liked the end result and it made me gain confidence in my abilities.   My strong point is definitely my work ethic.  I have always wanted to do well in school and will work all night if I have must to make whatever assignment I am doing the best it can be.  With this class and these assignments, I realized that my hard work will translate into great teaching.  I have no doubts that this is exactly what I am meant to do. 

I plan to use many of the tools I have learned about in this class regularly, to continue to grow my creativity.  I was most impressed by the Google Tools that I learned about in this class.  I definitely plan on using some of these in the future, and can see many ways to incorporate these into my future classroom. 

I was less impressed with the VOKI and Extranormal assignments.  I just cannot see many ways to incorporate them into my future classroom.  Since completing these assignments, I have seen a couple videos on Youtube of other people’s Extranormal videos and I was impressed.  One of the Extranormal videos was on the Common Core (Why We Need the Common Core: I Choose C).  It was very good. 

The Turnitin assignment was interesting.  I always knew there was a way for teachers to check for plagiarism, but I never knew how.  I think this is a great tool for educators.  Plagiarism is wrong.  This goes back to my work ethic.  I would be very upset if someone used my work as their own, so I would not do this to someone else.  I was shocked however, that when we first did the “copy” assignment, I literally copied and pasted everything on that paper and yet only got 80%.  To me, this should have been 100%.  It seems to me, this technology needs some improvements. 

Before this class, I had never heard of TED.  I thoroughly enjoyed those videos.  I learned so much by watching those people talk.  The topics discussed were things I had not thought of before.  I have thought about how boy’s natural tendencies to be a little more rough is being tamped down, but I have never thought about how that affects their feelings of acceptance and how that could translate into the reason there are so fewer male college graduates.  Fascinating.  The video I most enjoyed though was Ken Robinson on creativity.  This topic hits close to home for me.  Both of my children are extremely creative and cannot sit still.  It made me so happy to hear someone say that is not a bad thing.  It made me excited to be able to look at my children and my future students from that prospective.

Finally, I think that after completing all of the assignments, we touched on each of the NETS-T standards.  Being more creative myself, I will definitely be able to facilitate creativity in my students.  I have learned to design digital assignments and can be a model of how best to be an innovative professional.  I am a respectable digital citizen and I will promote responsible use of technology in my classroom.  Because of this class, I will continue to grow my knowledge of technology and how to apply it to teaching.