Reflections on course 1

It seems to me that a resonable way to reflect on this course would be to go back and look at my expectations for the course and see if I met them. So looking back, my expectations were the following:
- to get credits for relicensure.
I'm going to assume I'll reach that goal as soon as I finish this blog and put the final touches on my project. Check!

- to gain awareness of how students are using and could be using technology academically and socially.
This course has done a good job of helping reach this goal. Between the readings, the video clips, discussions and guest appearances in class, and the surfing I have done to learn for this class, I feel like I have a much better understanding of where many of my students are at with the use of technology for their academic work and in their social lives. I realize they are somewhere on the continuum of use between messing around and geeking out (go back and check the MacArthur Foundation white page report). Check!

-to be able to search and vet websites more effectively and efficiently.
Check with flying colors! Just this past week some of my ESL students asked me a question related to our topic in science class. I didn't have a ready answer for them. So we discussed what resources they had to try and answer the question for themselves. They said, "our notes." I replied that the answer wasn't in our notes. They said "our textbook." I said go ahead and look. They started flipping through the book page by page. Hmmm.... low level searching techniques. I asked them, "how do you find a topic quickly in a book?" It took a couple minutes before they came up with looking in the index. But alas, it wasn't there. Now where could we look? They looked puzzled but only for a brief moment. "The internet?" I replied, why don't you try. So a group of 4 came to my laptop (we didn't have student computers that day). One sat down and typed a very general topic into the google search window. Not surprisingly that elicited about 7 bazillion hits. (Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but a lot of hits.)
Aha! the perfect opportunity to talk about the ability of a google search to actually answer the question you have if you search with the question. They put in the question and within the first couple hits found their answer!

- to develop and enhance skills to utilize IT better in my work.
Well, I haven't really done too much along these lines. I have learned to use this blog site better than before but I'm not sure how much I will continue to use it. More on that later. Talking with others in the class has cued my interest in learning about voice threads and their uses in classes. I will be learning about Garage Band in a couple days. Hopefully that can be something to add to my skills arsenal. Maybe this is a tentative Check!

- to engage students in work that reflects their reality.
I think I was moving towards this goal this year even before beginning the course. Since I teach science, graph making is a big part of displaying experimental data and data analysis. I have taken big steps this year in teaching students the spreadsheet skills to enhance their ability to make accurate, meaningful graphs. I have also embraced the use of spreadsheet generated treadlines,equations and statistical measures of correlation to help students find meaning in their experimental data. Even if they lack the math skills to understand how the computer calculated these values, they can use them properly to support their conclusions. This course convinced me to accept Wikipedia as a useful and acceptable research source. The students have been trying to convince me for a couple years already! Check!

- to motivate me to try new things in my classroom.
I think the course has done this. Unfortunately, there may not be much evidence to support this conclusion at this time. One thing I have become increasingly aware of is if you want to try new things related to IT, the students need to have access to computers. And our current situation makes this a time consuming and speculative activity. It is a time consuming endeavor to find laptop carts available and book them. You have to plan, I would say at least 3 weeks in advance to ensure the carts will be available during your class periods. Then you may find out that your booking gets bumped due to another course's Common Assessment or maybe because you booked them for your classtimes, unaware that your classtimes would change due to schedule on a given day changing to accomodate an assembly, guest speaker, etc. If you don't go back and reschedule the carts, you may lose them because others have booked them using the "correct times" for that particular day. So it's always good to have a back-up plan! Maybe a Check minus for this one!

In addition to all of these things, I have found I'm really not very comfortable blogging. I have become comfortable using the blog tool and can now do it more efficiently than when the course started. But I am hesitant to post blogs because I certainly don't feel like an expert. I don't feel qualified to post my views about technology out on the web for all to see. I understand that one doesn't have to be a well established expert. Everyone starts somewhere. But because these posts are on the web, I tend to take way to much time thinking about what to write, how to write it and whether it is worthwhile to write. And in the end I'm not particularly satisfied with the posts.

Because of this, and because of the timing of course 2, I'm not sure I will continue with the certificate classes. I still have a couple weeks to make up my mind!