The Reflection

 This was my first time taking an online course.  I did miss the classroom environment and being able to converse with the instructor and fellow classmates. Any questions I have had has been answered quickly so that helped. I loved the convenience and would definitely take another class this way. Especially since I believe this is the future of education.  

I have learned so much from this course.  It really forced me to get out of my comfort zone.  Not that I'm inept with technology, but I just tend to keep the same things because that's what I'm familiar with.  For example, Power Point is what I have always used for presentations.  Now, I've used Google Slides, Padlet, and Mindomo to give a presentation. In addition, I used both Screencastify and Adobe Spark to narrate them.   I'm not a pro at using these but my interest and excitement has been sparked to keep it up because I fear if I don't use it, I will lose it.

(My next ventures. Phote taken from Snapchat and Instagram)

I had other firsts with this course as well.  I never blogged before or used Twitter.  I'm kinda mad at myself about not using Twitter, I didn't realize what a wealth of info was there for me.  Once again, I always just used Facebook so that is what I stuck with.  So now I want to see what the buzz is about with Instagram and Snapchat. (Outside of the photo filters.) 

Learning and doing so many things for the first time did come with its' challenges and I felt overwhelmed sometimes.  Thank goodness for YouTube, seriously, it walked me through many things.  I am also grateful for learning about the Triple E Framework because its' rubric will be especially helpful for picking out ed tech for my students.

I really wish my district would spend more time training us in implementing tech into our classrooms.  We have had very little and what is shown to us isn't revisited. It's all about test scores.  We use programs like Lexia, for reading and Dreambox for math. Students have only 30 minutess of computer a week and  I have only 5 I Pads to use with my students daily.  This is my challenge, training and equipment.  I see more technology classes in my future.