Personal Growth Plan

I used a pencil when I started school. In high school I used a typewriter and eventually a word processor. In my first year of teaching I was afraid to bring the class to the computer lab. Today, I invite the computer lab into the classroom when I ask students to bring their i-pods and smart phones. If I want to keep up, or educate children who will have careers in jobs that haven’t been invented yet, I need to grow and offer students the best that is out there. I need to give students my best.

When I think about using technology in the classroom to make a difference I have two goals. One is a short-term goal: using it to teach a lesson. If I have students use Quizlet.com to create flashcards, study them and then take an online test, is it better than students looking words up in a dictionary, using index cards to study, and taking my pen and paper test? I want to know if getting the immediate feedback from a computer while studying vocabulary is a better than studying with a friend after school. If it is, then it’s technology I want to use in my classroom. Being exposed, in this course, to tools I could use in my classroom will help me decide which tools add to my students’ education and which ones are merely for show.

My long term goal is success for the student beyond the walls of my building. It is imperative that I use technology in the classroom if I want my students to succeed. Web 2.0 didn’t just happen over time. It can be explained. It started out. People used it. People found a way to use it better. If I use Web 2.0 tools with my students, they someday will make it better. They will help it evolve to Web 3.0 and beyond. It is my duty to keep up to date with technological tools and give my students the opportunity to explore them.

Just like learning to use an overhead projector, or new attendance software, using blogs or wikis takes time as well. I used pbworks.com for creating wikis this year as a platform for publishing science reports. It was wonderful. But next year when I do it, the learning curve won’t be as steep. Sure, I might forget how to access a function. A new feature might be added. But I now know an easier way to register all the students. I know a better way to organize the pages. I can use the extra time to perfecting the lesson. All because I increased my skill in the technology. However, my goals extend beyond my classroom. I will bring it to grade-level meetings or to Language Arts meetings. Just the other day, when a teacher sent out an email describing how to access the MEAP data, I walked up to her and told her some day (after this course) I will show her how to create video walk through where she can record herself logging on while her voice will play over the video describing the actions. She could then send this to the teachers. She agreed it would be fantastic since several teachers, even though they had the information in the e-mail, still needed help logging in.