Second Reflection: What do I need to work on?

Part of becoming a better technology using teaching is doing a self assessment of your skills..  what are some areas that you need to work on to make more meaningful use of technology in your job.  If you are not sure how to answer this.. ask your coworkers or fellow students - they might be able to tell you.Make sure to tell me, why it limits you, or your teaching.. 

 

Reflecting back on my PD's I have had and the Science class I taught, I feel that there are some improvements I could make in two different areas that could make my use of technology more meaningful to the learner.

The first would be to better connect the technology to the learning objective and choose the technology that would best highlight and supplement this objective to increase overall learning. Picking the correct technology for the lesson is vital to help the student advance toward mastery of the learning objective. I believe sometimes I choose a technology that feels more like the "flavor of the month" or the latest and the greatest tools. It is a defiant need in my own instruction.  

The second way I could have a more meaningful use of technology would to put the tech into the teachers hands and let them manipulate and learn the tech for themselves (with a little guidance). The main goal of my job is to get the teachers to incorporate more technology into their lessons and that would be hard to do if they didn't have much experience with using it for themselves. The teachers would not only learn how to use the new ideas but in learning they would also learn how to troubleshoot for possible problems they might encounter in using these items. 

I hope that as my semester goes on I can work on these weaknesses and hopefully make gains toward becoming a better overall instructor.