Reflections+EDLD5306

EDLD 5306 Fundamentals of Educational Technology

This was the first course in my masters program and all the different parts of the assignments we had to complete the first week overwhelmed me, to be honest halfway through the first week I was ready to cut my losses and quit. However, after much encouragement from my wife and family I opted to go forward and commit to completing the program. Looking back to this course, I remember analyzing the Long-Range Plan for Technology and realizing that we have a lot of work ahead of us as educators to be able to reach the goals for technology. I found that many of our teachers including myself were not aware of the Texas Long-Range Plan or the significance to our curriculum and teaching. The Texas Long-Range Plan for technology is a complete plan that includes students, educators, parents, and the community in implementing technology in the curriculum and management of our schools and districts by the year 2020. It will guide districts in Texas in the effective use of technology to prepare students to learn and work in the 21st Century. After learning about the Texas Long-Range Plan, I realized that we had much work ahead of us as teachers and as a district to accomplish these goals. What I have learned can assist me in identifying our campus and district needs in reaching and accomplishing this Long-Range Plan. We also learned about and analyzed the Technology Application TEKS from K-12. The TATEKS are setup so the students build their technology skills on the foundation they learned the previous years. The Technology Applications TEKS are arranged to help students build on skills that allow many learning opportunities to master use of this knowledge. The TATEKS function is the same as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), they guide Teachers and administrators as to what a student should learn each year.

In the coming weeks, I learned how critical the Texas Campus STaR Chart is and how to analyze its information to identify our campus strengths and weaknesses. This allows us to focus on specific areas of need. The STaR Chart provided information on four different categories, which include teaching and learning, educator learning and professional development, leadership, and infrastructure for technology. Originally I believed the STaR Chart was a survey that every teacher in the state had to take, but was not familiar with what this information provided about our campus and how it could be used to identify and rectify areas or weaknesses. We learned to work on our weaknesses by analyzing and evaluating Websites that will provide support and knowledge to strengthen our areas of need, these websites provide information and understanding that would improve our campus areas of needed improvement. We also learned how to create a blog and wiki and the purpose of these two web 2.0 tools. I learned how these are very powerful Web based tools used for communication and collaboration purposes. I created my own wiki and asked teachers in my campus to join and collaborate weekly about issues related to curriculum. As I recall, our district used to block the websites such as blogs and Wikis and I had to request permission to have access and share my wiki with colleagues at our campus. I have learned to work collaboratively through Wikis and Google Docs this has helped me in my educational and professional development as I continue to use these tools. In my opinion, these are excellent Web 2.0 tools that we must learn to integrate into our curriculum and provide our students with the technology skills to succeed in today’s world. 