During the course of EDLD 5306,I have learned several things. I have been blogging for quite some time about my family, but never on education. This was a new concept that I am now more familiar with and would like to incorporate in my classroom. After taking this course, I conferenced with a teacher at my school who uses blogs on an almost daily basis. She requires that her English class post all of their papers to a blog site and have fellow sutends make comments and suggestions for improvement. She herself can then easily make comments and suggestions. This has turned out to be a great use for her classroom. In the first week's assignments, we had to take a look at the Long Range Plan for Technology. I was glad to study this and see what Texas had in store for our students. It made me question where exactly our district was on this plan and where we could be. I also had to analyze my strengths and weaknesses, which turned out to be true on both. On the second week's assignment, we had to review the STaR chart. I was very happy to analyze this. Prior to this course, I had taken the STaR chart analysis for my school district but had no clue what it was for or how my ratings made any sort of impact. Little did I know, my votes actually counted! In fact, "all certified classroom teachers and librarians are required to complete the Teacher STaR Chart" ( ). That information would have been helpful when completing my teacher certification. Studying the STaR chart also allowed me to see where our district stood on ratings of technology when compared to other districts. This is the point were we also had to create a blog. As far using a blog system as a way to communitcate with our stakeholders, I think this would be an excellent tool. However, it must be kept up to date. A leader in our school district did quite a bit of advertising about her blog for parents and students and how she would update it. However, when it came down to it, I may have only been updated once in an entire year. That defeats its purpose. Building a wiki in week three of the course was a new concept. I knew what Wikipedia was, I knew nothing about just a wiki. "A wiki is a Web page and as such is accessible to anyone with a Web browser and an Internet connection. The ease of use makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring" (Schrum, 2007). I have already talked to my department about implementing a wiki for us on developing our curriculum.
Soloman, G. & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0: New tools, New schools. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education. 57-58.
Texas Education Agency. (n.d.) FAQ: Why Submit a STaR Chart? Retrieved April 16 2011 from http://starchart.esc12.net/faqWhy.html
No comments:
Post a Comment