Course Takeaways

I have enjoyed the blended and online instruction course over the past couple of months. It has been difficult at times to find the time to accomplish everything, but I have learned many things that will impact my teaching going forward. I realize now that I too often use substitution or augmentation as a way to implement technology, simply using technology to replace an existing lesson idea. It really challenged my thinking to hear a video in which an educator talked about his daughter learning the piano through youtube videos. I have done the same thing. His point....students don't need teachers to learn information. They can get it more easily through the Internet. Our job is to curate resources for them and create lessons that challenge them to apply their learning. I learned that we need to give students more ownership and choice over their own learning, and that collaboration is critical to learning in a digital environment.

I have discovered some good resources, such as symbaloo, popplet, screencast-o-matic, and bubbl.us (already have used bubbl.us in class and students loved it).

I thought that I was fairly competent in my use of technology in the classroom, but now I realize that I can be doing so much more with my students.