Final+Assessment+Course+Reflection+Responses

Respond in the expandable boxes below. Remember to copy and paste your responses to your wiki. 1. What outcomes had you envisioned for this course? Did you achieve those outcomes? Did the actual course outcomes align with those that you envisioned? Mastering teachnology teaching involves technology technology use and knowledge and how to integrate it into a lesson. My goal was to succeed in integration since I have already computer skills. Better use of technology tools (web, blogs and strategies) is a needed skill. In my experience in teaching I have always tried to do digital books, use wordprocessors. When I learned about the book builder and the free software available immediately I started to implement it in my classes. Book builder helps me to support special needs students, and motivation ( Brain Networks, Assessment and computer use, immediate feedback) for those students that are low in interest. Research has shown that English learners have also benefited from the use of this software and learning experiences. I experienced first hand the challenges that teachers may have when Lesson Designing. This is an outcome that I expected and that was fullfiled very well. 2. To the extent that you achived the outcomes, are they still relevant to the work that you do in your school? Why or why not? Specifically this year, implementation of several software in the labs and integration of technology in classroom lessons has been some of my priorities. To raise awareness that technology is not “**one more thing”** to do but “**the thing”** is my goal this year. Learning about the assessments and lesson design UDL was for the most part interesting and refreshing. Difficulties are present in my school such a reaction on the school towards taking teaching time to integrate different student centered lessons. These challenges are mainly to teacher’s rejection to new way to teach. The different elements and concepts such as constructivism made my bag of tricks a little fuller. Is not what you know but where you know the information is. Also, capitalizing in students strengths and interests is easily addressed with the use of computers and software as well as the web 2..0 tools available today. 3. What outcomes did you not achieve? What prevented you from achieving them? Without doubt, research has always been very useful to convince teachers about the use of technology. Technology use findings and conlclusions are clear evidence that strategies work and how they are better to be implemented. Readings were very interesting and reading through the selections posed a challenge time wise. Reading through them and analazying the mbetter would allow me to produce synthesis and conclusions to present to my teacher. This was not possible for me to do it at this time. My goal will be to create charts to present graphic history of the successes in technology implementation and the areas such as wordprocessor use, text to speech and the assessement accommodations as well as the results. The pacing of the course only allowed to continue to reflect and contribute to the team classroom scenario. Time of the year affected to the overall participation on my discussions therefore I could only state my initial statements on Fridays and almost did not received feedback or replys. 4. Were you successful in completing the course assignments? If not, what prevented or discouraged you? Course is designed to complete the diverse ways to interact with the content in more than 15 hours. Using 9 hours (despite of my effort to use study more hours) sometimes made me feel that I could learn a little deeper but the content of the course is already extense and many areas were exposed to us. This should become the starting point to research and apply strategies in our own school environments. Web conferences was one experience that I did not explored in this course. I believe that could have been a great experience although I viewed the recorded version of one of those sessions. Team group collaboration through google docs was effective and we all came a long way as far as exposure and use of this tool. Considering that some difficulties arose when sharing my docs with the rest of the team, everything else ran smoothly and I learned that a good leadership still is necessary even in a virtual settings. 5. What did you learn from this course: about yourself, your technology and leadership skills, and your attitudes? A “one size fits all” type of assessment does not apply in today’s student’s needs. Students need to feel a “cool” environment in their schools where we “talk” their language and we know their language is already internet, celphones and web2.0. These two facts pose a challenge for me since the structure of schools are not adequate to the proposed classes environment for this technology use. Mostly many schools are worried about students achieving the TAKS test. In the other hand, I did feel that creating a working together in a virtual environment does pose certain challenges such as discipline and commitment and to stick to schedules as any other real working environment. Definitely, we were very productive and our work load was equitable distributed and according to skills. I learned that it is always useful to have a proactive leardership like we the one we had, and that we were communicating online with human relationships and human touch to achieve the different goals and challenges we faced. That is a skill I learned from my team members and practiced.
 * Course Reflection Prompts **