How Far We've Come- Literacy and Technology: Semester Reflections

I cannot believe that the semester has come to a close.  As I look back to January to where I am now, I feel I have grown tremendously as an educator.  This was my first online based class so I was definitely a little apprehensive about how it would all work.  How would I be able to meet up with my group?  Would I be able to successfully format and submit assignments?  Would I be able to implement the resources properly?  As with everything new in life you need experience and time to get the hang of things.  I feel that Team TechSavy  came together and worked in a very successful and collaborative way.  We were in frequent contact with each other through gmail, googledocs and with our biweekly WizIq meetings.  We were able to successfully divide up the assignments.  By working as a team, we were able to bounce ideas of each other, use our particular areas of expertise, and practice the important art of compromise.
 Some of my favorite groups projects were the teacher toolkit we created and the 21st Century Classroom  Parent Newsletter.  In these assignments, we  divided up the work into our content areas and found different resources.  It was nice to see how all of our work was able to come together  into a finalized product on googledocs, letterpop, and pbworks.  In the future I will continue to use all of these sites.

My two favorite independent assignments were the digital story telling assignment and the engrade review assignment.  I had never made a digital story before and had no idea how to do so.   I used my iMovie software and was able to narrate, pick out pictures and music to create my own story.  Creating a digital story is a great way for teachers to engage students. The possibilities are endless with digital stories. I enjoyed the engrade assignment alot because I was so impressed with how easy it was to use and how much the site had to offer.  From grading, to creating flashcards and quizzes, to communicating with teachers and parents, it was very impressive.

I found the whole class meeting on WebEx very insightful.  We were able to come together as a whole class and reflect and present our findings. I particularly enjoyed the  class session where we had a guest speaker, Mary Anne,  who is a digital media specialist and educator that lives in Washington.  Listening to her speak about all of the fantastic technology resources that teachers have available to them was very exciting.  She spoke about  such things as twitter, blogging, webquests, ipads, moodle and facebook.  All of these things can be used to enhance learning and connect teachers to other teachers around the world.

Looking back there is no question that I have learned alot that I will carry with me in my career as a educator.  This course has allowed me to see all of the wonderful tools that are available to enhance, create, aid, and simply teaching.  I am a firm believer that education needs to evolve with the times.  We are in living in the 21st century.  Therefore, we need to be teaching 21st century skills.  We need to be 21st century teachers.  We need to engage students, make learning interactive, relevant, personalized, and fun. Technology allows teachers to do all  of these things.  I am looking forward to using all of these tools in the classroom.

Thank you Dr. Smirnova! It truly was a great learning adventure!