Learning Experience 1 Reflection

  Sometimes I feel like I get a little lost in the day-to-day of teaching and it is such a hustle to get everything done that I forget - or just put off -  spending time to reflect on whether what I am doing is really helping students learn better.  This first unit in the IICT part 2 course pulled me back out of my gradual off-course spin and made me rethink my practices in the classroom.  It was great to connect to other teachers and find out what they are doing in their classroom.  I don't get enough chances to do that.  There were a few things that really stood out for me.

 Starting off with a look at appropriate tech usage policies for students and staff at our school was especially relevant for me as we are a new school and this has not yet been developed.  I did a little research on our school board website and found a policy that we can now use in creating our own school policy...which I think is very important.

  Another key learning for me was the SAMR model of integration of ICT in the classroom.  I was shocked to learn that many of the strategies I have been using with my students did not make it past the Augmentation stage.  It was useful to spend some time brainstorming ways to make the integration more meaningful and to try and move it up to the Redefinition stage.  It was also interesting to see how other people integrated in their ideas and their ideas on bumping up their integration strategies.

  Finally, I found the Skype and Web 2.0 activities very useful as they gave me specific example of how to engage students more through the use of ICT in the classroom.  I signed up for next year's Global Read Aloud and for Mystery Skype - I couldn't be more excited to give these a try and to experience how my students' engagement increases.  I do feel that I need to spend time fine tuning these to connect them to the curriculum and to make sure I implement them authentically and not just for the sake for trying something new.

  A question I still have and one that I hope will be answered later in the course, is around the issue of privacy.  I would love to use applications like Skype in my classroom, but definitely do not want to put my students at risk in any way...or get in some kind of trouble for not respecting student privacy.  I am not sure what the expectations/criteria are around this and would definitely like to find out before I use any of these in my class

Reflection Is Part Of Your Work

I am buying what George is selling and now I'm all excited to start blogging - and to try introducing it to my kids...  I do think that honest reflection is super important and that it makes us better teachers which, in turn, benefits our students.  I also think that teachers reflect even if they do not blog.  Teaching is probably one of the most reflective professions out there.  Think about it...we get to try a bunch of strategies for a whole year and then get to decide if we want to use those same strategies again the next year on a different set of students.  Every time we teach a lesson, we automatically run through the whole thing again afterwards and make decisions on what worked and what didn't, and on how we would change it in the future (or scrap it in totality).

Having said that, the thing that excites me about blogging is to force myself to be even more reflective.  Formalizing the process by putting pen to paper, or in this case, finger to key, means I can document my successes and failures and look them up later.  Successes can be repeated and tweaked to perfection while failures can be learned from to make me a better teacher.  Hopefully it will also help me be more organized.

Now if I can just figure out 'tags' and 'categories' I think I can make this work.