CEP810 Personal Learning Reflection

   Wow, eight weeks did go by fast.  It probably did not help that I was playing catch up for the last four.  After the first eight weeks of this degree I am proud to report that I could not be happier about my choice to pursue it.  From the very beginning I have been challenged to think about what it means to teach with technology in ways I had never imagined.  I have learned about tons of technologies that I had never used and have started asking questions about how to best integrate them with my classes.
   My favorite aspect of this class has been learning the technologies in a hands on way.  I had never blogged, kept bookmarks on delicious, or shared what I was doing in any way.  The whole time that I was doing these labs I kept going over a list of questions in my head.  How could I use this with my class?  How can I structure a lesson with this technology where the technology is not the focus but is instead an aid to learning? (I have some concerns about how to deal with the logistics of running a lesson in a technology based setting and having the mathematics be the focus as opposed to spending my whole time just helping students get the technology to work).  The addition of the NETS standards at the end of the class answered a large part of the overarching question I had had all along, how do I evaluate weather the technology is doing anything useful for students?  
   The SIG project was the highlight of the course for me.  Working with others and having to find solutions to problems with technology allowed me to explore issues as they arose was a powerful experience.  For example the discovery of the chat feature in Google Docs allowed the three of us to communicate effectively while we simultaneously edited our proposal document and then again when we were actually crafting the content of our wiki.  Another problem arose when we needed to combine all of our bookmarks with delicious.  We had to find a way to aggregate them and then pick out the ones that we wanted to share with the world.  We settled on the idea of creating a new account with Delicious and then linking to all of our bookmarks.  We found quickly that when we were crafting the wiki page that it was difficult to communicate in real time on the wiki page itself, so we returned to doing our work on the Google Docs site where we could communicate in real time and then copying and pasting to the wiki once we felt we had created a presentation that combined all of our individual work effectively.  Good grief, start checking of NETS standards for this project!
   After I had written the paragraph in my Personal Technology Plan paper about expending my PLN with people I have real world contact with I spoke with our libary media specialist.  We talked about technology integration and what our district was implementing.  When she told me that next years eighth grade students will have gone through some experience that will have introduced them to many of the technologies that I had just been working with in this class I was awe struck.  She asked a very straight forward question immediately afterwards.  "What will happen when a teacher in this building tells them that they have to do it some other way when they know a smarter way to accomplish the task already?"  We look like idiots is the simplest answer.  I have continued to strengthen my resolve that we as teachers need to be more than just aware of what students know, we need to make sure that we are a part of it if we want to stay relevant to them.
   I have done much more than meet the goals that I set forth in my initial Growth Plan.  I experienced things that I had never anticipated experiencing in this class.  I revised my understanding of what it means to teach effectively in the 21st century.  I have set new goals with the understanding that many of them will need to be revised as I learn more about how to use the technologies I have encountered throughout this course and those that I expect to encounter in the future.  Oddly, the one idea that is set in stone is that everything changes and I have the choice to be thoughtful about it or sit back and watch as I am made obsolete.