EIT - Final Reflection

Over the last several weeks, I have expanded my knowledge on emerging instructional technologies. Most of them, I had no idea they even existed. This class has driven me to learn about different technologies and how they could be incorporated into a classroom setting. I like the challenge it presented by encouraging me to expand my comfort zone from known concepts to unknown. Overall, this week has been one of many accomplishments. I loved having our guest speakers Skype into our classroom. It is amazing what can be done with all the different types of technologies available.

Some of the emerging technologies we discussed in class came naturally to use (Google Docs, Google Pages, and PowerPoint.) Since I have a background in business education and have taught students word processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentation software for a few years. This seemed realistic.

A few of the tools required more time to process and learn how to maneuver around. These technologies were blogs, wikis, twitter, ning, video files, Jing, voicethread and Podcast files. I can see me implementing a ning, Jing, voicethread, blog, and/or wikis in my class. These tools provide opportunities for my students to interact in digital native capacity. I liked the possibilities they provided.

I have learned that I am capable of learning new concepts and applying them to my classroom instruction. Some of the concepts/skills required more practice than others to learn – like Second Life. (This virtual world has so many layers to it. It will take quite some time to discover all the components and their uses it possesses.) One of the benefits of this class was being able to explore the emerging technology right away. I’m a firm believer a person has to do something before they can fully understand it. The learning process for me is accelerated when this can occur.

The group project made it possible for us to complete a Ning fully to see how it could operate in a school setting. Each person of our team had certain tasks they were responsible for in completing. There were so many different ideas for this project is was hard to narrow down our selection. However, through negotiations we came up with doing a Ning for a school to have its faculty utilize it.

For this group project, we had a collaboration page where we shared concepts, ideas and a simple page to post websites, links we had to have posted to the Ning. This simplified the group project immensely. The capability of this tool to immediately update a document was powerful. We posted all our links and information to the Ning for ease of use by the faculty. I enjoyed working with this team of individuals and look forward to the two years ahead of us.