I feel the best way to learn something is to teach it.
Even when I wasn't formally teaching, I was teaching. I was teaching my friends how to scrapbook, teaching my kids how to tie their shoes and teaching my family how to garden. I have always been the type of learner who gets excited about the new things I learn, and ultimately looks for the best way to teach it.
I am committed to sharing the knowledge I am learning in my technology courses with others. My biggest concern in all areas of my educational practice is the overwhelming feelings about technology felt by my students, parents, co-workers and fellow professors. This attitude toward technology is due to their developing knowledge base or skill level in the area of technology. Many of them are not familiar with how technology can be used with students or where to find free resources that are user friendly. I plan to research the best way to teach others about technology and examine what works best when sharing with them.
I also have another problem in my practice regarding websites. When one of my parents go to search for reading on a search engine, they are given many programs or lesson books that are for purchase. They often cannot find quality resources without ads popping up everywhere. They often have a hard time finding quality websites for their students. The teachers at my school also need some new and exciting technology resources.
I, like many of my parents, teacher friends and students have little slips of paper everywhere with websites written on them. I have them located everywhere at school and at home. I have these website addresses in notebooks, on parent handouts and on my refrigerator. None of them explain what the addresses are. They are not organized and do not help others. I hope to somehow organize all of the knowledge I am learning into a web-based resource for other educators, parents and students.
My goal is to change attitudes by educating others about how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to educate students. I propose to create a website that effectively explains these technologies to them and how they can use them in their classrooms. In addition to creating this website, I plan to personally work with others to explain in more detail how these technologies can be learned and utilized.
This is how I plan to address these educational issues with technology. My solution of creating a website will make a real impact on these issues.
In my next blog I will touch upon :
Relevant research and resources (from the Internet and elsewhere) including reports on the closest effort I can find to what I am planning to do as well as ideas and materials I may be able to build upon.
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A plan for the portionI will implement during this course and the portion I will implement after this course completes.
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How my project addresses the four common places of education:
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Someone teaching
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Someone learning
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Some subject matter
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In some setting
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Hi Heather ~ From reading through the information describing the "problem" you would like to tackle for your TechQuest - it appears to me that you have two separate issues that are equally challenging and equally important – professional development (technology) concerns with your fellow college professors and technology integration and information sharing with your K-8 parents and teaching colleagues. I would like to suggest that you select one of the issues for the TechQuest project. You can always address the remaining issue later on. An idea I’d like to toss out for your consideration ~ Creating a Delicious (Furl, Diggo, etc.) account for your parents, students, and colleagues that annotates and tags important resources. A link to the account’s address can be placed on the website you wish to build – along with links to the other resources you would like to share with your audience (Jing tutorials, pdf’s, etc.). Visitors can then visit the Delicious site and use the tags to filter and search for needed resources. This would be one way to ensure that quality, pre-screened, free and relevant resources are readily available. I created a Delicious account for my building and the teachers are successfully sharing resources with each other (http://delicious.com/RobertKerr). I’m really looking forward to your next blog post – to see what direction you elect to take with this assignment=8-)
ReplyDeleteWow- this is a pretty large project. I'm impressed! Susan's idea about Delicious sounds like it may be beneficial to share resources with teachers. I know some of the teachers in my school would take well to sharing ideas using a Delicious account while others will be intimidated by it. Professional development would help solve this though, because teachers would feel more aware and competent using the program, service, etc. We just recently had a professional development workshop during an in-service day and the teachers took kindly to it. Technology savvy teachers taught other teachers how to use some free services. The media center specialist also presented a few resources and showed teachers how to use them. Teachers I never thought would touch technology are trying some of those resources with their students now because of the in-service helped them to gain confidence and made the technology seem less daunting. I think the professional development approach to this assignment may end up being more beneficial to you because it not only will help other teachers in your school feel comfortable using technology, but it also will have more staying power. New programs and services are constantly being developed, so what is new now may be replaced with something new and improved in a couple years. What we know of affective strategies in professional development won't change quite as rapidly.
ReplyDeleteHeather,
ReplyDeleteHow will you choose which Web 2.0 technologies you will teach about or not teach about? This one issue that I have ran into in the CEP classes. There are so many options, even for blogs, how do you choose which ones to "cover" and which ones that you will "omit"?