Reflecting back on my personal learning theory, that I developed in week 1, based on the knowledge that I gained from this course, I would not modified my learning theory. My personal theory about how students learn is: that students must be able to access the information being present to them, feel comfortable in the learning environment, receive positive reinforcement, and make meaningful connections to the information being presented. I believe that technology can be very easily integrated into my personal learning theory and there is no need to spell it out in the learning theory.
Any immediate adjustments that I will make to my instructional practice regarding technology integration will be to have at least one integrated lesson per day. I need to have my students on the computers more and take advantage of all of the resources out there that would let my students express their knowledge in a way that best fits them. Two technology tools that I would like to use with my students would web cams and VoiceThread. The reason that I picked web cameras is because my students are deaf and communicate through sign language. I think that web cameras would be a great to track progress of each student’s language development and reading fluency. It would be a great tool as well to record books so that the students can have a watching center instead of a listening center, which is what their hearing peers have. The reason that I want to use VoiceThread is because it allows the students to interact with each other in a different way and to have conversations about educational topics, so that they are getting that language practice and vocabulary development. It is also a good tool, because it allows the students to practice their writing skills, in a new and exciting way. I can also then grading and or track their progress with concrete evidence through these assessments as well.
My first long-term goal that I would like to make in my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to be able to think of ways that technology would support the standard curriculum without much effort. Right now, I have to work hard at making technology integrate into my curriculum. I want to be a person that people could give me a topic and could list five different ways that technology could be integrated into the lessons. The first to achieving this goal is to finish my degree in Integrating Technology in the Classroom. The second would be to follow blogs or professional journals and get ideas from the current experts in the field. The third would be to try as often as possible to have integrated lessons, and then make notes on each lesson about what work and what did not work so that in the future the lesson could be improved. The final step would be keep working at it because practice makes perfect and to attend workshops and classes to keep update on all of the new technologies that are available and support education.
My second long-term goal that I would like to make in my instructional practice regarding technology integration is to have every lesson for every subject to have some technology integration built into it. The first step would be to pick one subject and try to have one lesson a week, and then to slowly build to having it in every lesson. The second step would be to add another subject after, feeling comfortable with the previous subject or subjects. The third thing would be then to work towards having all subjects. I think that it could be a huge undertaking, but I think the key will be to take it slow and not try and hurry. I think that this goal may take a couple years to full master, but I think the pay out at the end is well worth the effort. I know that I cannot do it alone, so I will need to tap into every resource available to me whether it be blog sites, professional journals, workshops, classes, and or people around me.
