I enjoyed Concepts of Educational Technology course I took. I am glad I finally decided to take the step to get back in school and do this. At first I was excited and did not realize how much work would be involved in the course. I think the thing that overwhelmed me most is that since it is a 5 week course it would be accelerated and involved a lot of outside time for the work and mostly for the reading. I gained much insight into the fundamental issues technology specialist and administrators in the schools have to deal with on a yearly basis. Since I come from the technical side of I did not realize that the technology specialist in the schools had to deal with outside stakeholders and rating teacher competencies. I just really thought they trained the teachers in-house and ordered software and hardware. So this was an eye-opener for me. Mainly what I want to achieve out of the program is to bridge my technical skills with my teaching skills and help to give a better understanding to educators, technologist, and administrators what each entity does to serve each other and no one entity is trying to hinder another but help to achieve the ultimate goal which is student/learner success in technology and their education.
I was able to achieve a rapport with my cohorts and able to share ideas even though most of us are a distance away from each other. The majority of the issues discussed in this class, I would agree with most of my cohorts to say that they are very relevant to what we face with education. Especially in how to teach the "Digital Native." This is a new challenge for us being I think the transition generation that grew up around the times when all of these tools were being developed. We have to use what we know and integrate it into what we know is going to be to keep the "digital native" interested in our classrooms.
I was not able to achieve full success with a small bit of the reading because of external forces in my life. And I was not able to attend all of the web conferences like I would have like to because I looked at one source and it had them scheduled for the 4th days of each week, and come to find out they were scheduled for a day prior to them in another source. So the inconsistency threw me off. I wish I could have attended them all, then I could have gotten some clarity with Ms. Borel and other classmates online real-time. That could have made a difference on a couple of assignments. This is a great way to share information face-to-face so to speak. I wish there was a way we could have conferenced together outside of official web conferences. I hope that sooner or later we learn more tools that will help to integrate technology into the classroom like this course did. I do consider myself very tech saavy but after taking this course I feel like I have only brushed the surface of tools available.
I am learning that there some educational views from educators standpoints that I may have to voice my professional opinion. From a technical standpoint, that there may be limitations to what teachers want given the current infrastructure, and on the other hand I may see limitless possibilities in other areas of instruction given the current infrastructure and I feel like I will be fully utilized as a technician and technology leader with what I have learned. So I am very upbeat in the prospect of what I can contribute from my experiences.
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