Course Reflections

Over the past five weeks I have completed my first graduate-level course, and I have accomplished quite a bit in such a short amount of time. Going into this course and this program in general, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Honestly, I had come very close to not going through with the program at all, debating and discussing with friends, colleagues, and family the pros and cons of this master’s program. I decided to “try it out” with one course to see how I liked it (the Jenny Craig approach). When that one course was titled “Fundamentals of Educational Technology”, I died a little on the inside, remembering such fond times as Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Introduction to Computer Science, two courses, designed to weed out the non-engineers, that made me into the math teacher I am today. I was concerned that this would be a “separate the men from the boys” type introductory class, and my initial goal was simply to get through it. After the first week, my goals and expected outcomes changed dramatically; I wanted to learn how to set up, personalize, and maintain 2.0 technologies, and I wanted to learn how to incorporate them into my classroom. Although, I am quite sure I’ll be learning more detailed operations and advanced applications in future courses, I believe all of my expectations have been met, even going so far as to even get through the course. Not only that, but outcomes I hadn’t expected or planned for have come to fruition: I feel more comfortable with the ins and outs of not only how to implement technology integration but how to do it in a safe and appropriate manner.

After the third week’s reading assignment, I became overcome with an excitement for this next school year, an excitement I haven’t felt since I was given the opportunity to teach calculus. Say what you want, but that’s exciting. I set about immediately talking to my principal about how I can incorporate blogs, wikis, and vidcasts into my classroom while still ascribing to district policy, meeting with my curriculum specialist concerning professional development I wanted to lead after becoming more proficient with these tools, and discussing with the director of technology the limits on bandwidth and memory to accomplish my goals. I even went so far to post on my Facebook status (which I do very irregularly), “I want to apologize to all of my former students because this year is going to be awesome!” Not only is what I’ve learned throughout this course relevant to my job, but it’s something I’m genuinely ecstatic about integrating into the courses I teach.

However, one outcome I would have liked to achieve, something I had come up with during my flurry of excitement and, dare I say, giddiness, was the ability to create a blog or wiki that held some applicable aspects to the courses I teach. I was developing all of these great ideas, but I didn’t have an opportunity to share them through my course work. Blogs and wikis were used in this course just to summarize articles and books, state opinions of articles and technology plans, and report on summaries our districts and states had already developed. Although I understand the importance of examining all the documents assigned, it felt strange to me that we were simply rehashing and rephrasing information from them, rather than applying them to something truly useful. If we want to get into the Digital Native mindset, why are we performing Digital Immigrant tasks? Rather than reading and reciting, we should be applying and producing.

Along the same lines, there were times I felt confused by the instructions in the assignments. Even though this did not result in incomplete or unsuccessful assignments, it did provide me with frustration every now and again. There were times when the explanations were overly long, there were times when the explanations left things out, and there were times when they just weren’t very clear and were even contradictory. However, I was able to work my way through it by deciphering the meanings myself, from reading posts and responses on the message board, and from e-mailing instructors and advisors. Additionally, the rubrics provided clarification of expectations for an assignment. One area where I was less successful was in the first week discussion post, where I missed out on some points because I had no clue what “Final Word Protocol” meant. Although I should have asked for clarification, further explanation would have been useful right up front.

Overall, this course has been quite eye-opening for many reasons, some of which really have nothing to do with technology. Sadly, I didn’t take college as seriously as I should have, spending more time rehearsing for plays in my evenings than studying for tests and completing assignments. Having taught for several years, I find that I have much more patience and appreciation for learning in general, and I know I will be successful throughout this program. Furthermore, I now have a digital tool chest (I’m still acquiring tools) to motivate and inspire my students to learn and enjoy the process of learning. Finally, I have learned I am not nearly as tech-savvy as I thought I was, and I am not nearly as proficient with Web 2.0 tools as I figured I would be. Where once I would have counted myself amongst the digital native population, I must resign myself to being nothing more than a fairly fluent digital immigrant, but one who’s working towards his digital citizenship.