Educators experiment with leading edge technologies such as, but not
limited to, handheld devices, podcasting, and Web-based technologies to
determine their usefulness in teaching, learning, integration into
curricula, and matching technologies to students' learning styles. They
build knowledge, expertise and experience in identifying the efficacy of
future technologies in enhancing student learning and enabling students to
learn new topics and ideas previously out of reach. Technologies
experimented with will vary as new ones emerge.
Many of the technologies used in this course I'd already used but I
still learned a tremendous amount seeing how it was taught and learning
from the experiences of others. I also had my share of technical
difficulties that resulted in some great solutions. When YouTube wouldn't
work for over a day to upload an assignment that was due, I encountered an
article about TeacherTube and loved it. I've shared that resource with
many teachers this summer and hope it continues to be a video sharing
resource for educators.
Microsoft's PhotoStory was a real find. It's so easy to use and is a
great tool for multimedia work. I've taught many teachers to use it
already and most are excited at the prospect of using it for digital
storytelling and creating portfolio artifacts that students can author.
The work I put into researching, developing and creating this portfolio
and reviewing and writing reflections is particularly timely given our
school district and state initiatives with ICT online portfolios. As with
many new initiatives, we acquire knowledge and develop best practices over time
and this exercise has been valuable for me. It's been difficult to
determine what to include and why and that's going to be very challenging
for all our teachers and students to decide upon. I certainly wish I'd
built the portfolio as I'd progressed through the program but many classes
required journals or reflections that were retrievable. Some were only
done online and I didn't have access to most of the forums anymore. It's
also interesting to reflect later upon what I actually remember from a
course that was taken a few years ago - sometimes it was more exposure to
new ideas, concepts and resources and sometimes it was certain projects or
learning new skills. It would be interesting to have students spend some
time in the fall of each year reflecting on last year's portfolio.
