10 - The Finish Line

Data collection tools can be very useful for me to use in the future as a high school history teacher. I think it is a good idea to survey the students before each lesson to discover what concepts they're already comfortable with. These surveys can help me adapt the lesson plans to be more effective by not wasting time on ideas that the students already know and instead developing on new ideas and concepts. Data collection results can also help me determine what resources the students found to be the most useful. Again, receiving feedback from the students can help me adjust and continue to increase the efficiency of my teaching methods.

The aspect that I found most interesting from reviewing classmates' blogs was the assignment screen shots and descriptions. I feel that I lack some of the creativity that others have, and I was able to view different techniques and options that others chose throughout the semester. I also found it interesting that we were all able to find different resources online. The fact that we were all able to find unique resources shows the vast amount of options online. The blog assignments were actually a lot more useful than I thought they were going to be because of the different points of view that we brought to the posts. I think a similar blog or discussion board will be useful in my future classroom for students to share ideas, designs, and websites like we did.

The technology related skill that I wish to continue developing is webpage creation. Students are very comfortable online and a well designed class webpage may help increase student interaction and motivation. More specifically, I hope to work on creating videos and recordings to post as resources online. Since I plan to teach history, I believe that videos and interactive aspects of a class webpage would help increase interest in a traditionally "boring" subject.

I hope to attend seminars and conferences in order to achieve my future educational technology goals. Learning from other teachers may be one of the best ways to implement new technology in an effective way. Furthermore, I will definitely be using lynda.com to view tutorials and learn about creative ways to increase technology use in my lesson plans. There seem to be countless ways to use technology in the classroom and we'll all need to continue to learn in order to not be left behind.