Final Reflection for EDUC 6710

This course provided me with courage to finally explore the many different tools available on the World Wide Web. In my past I always heard about Web 2.0 applications yet I never had that much experience with those tools and was quite frankly intimidated with integrating them into my own classroom. The applications included in this course were blogs, podcasts and wikis, yet it is quite easy to realize the potential for more unknown Web 2.0 tools in the future. This course forced me to utilize these three applications in a new educational arena. From using these tools, it is quite easy to see how 21st Century skills can be accomplished by turning the classroom from a teacher centered environment to one that is more student centered. In such a setting student achievement will greatly improve as the students will have a larger value of ownership on the content material, and they will be much more engaged in the classroom. Also, today’s work place is highly technological and the employees in that work environment have a large amount of responsibility thrown on their shoulders to lead the company in new innovative directions. Today’s engaging and student centered learning environment, which allows for copious collaboration among peers, should be able to prepare those students for those future occupational roles.

Currently my school has little access to computers within the school day. It is true that a large majority of my students do have access to personal computers at home. Yet when reviewing the course DVD segments, I am quite jealous to see how all these other teachers get to teach using computers in their own classroom environment and I do not have access to such similar resources at my school. In the future it is my responsibility to convince the administration, other colleagues, the parents of the importance of using such resources in the classroom setting as well. My hope is that I will be able to obtain these resources in the classroom environment in the near future for the betterment of my students. A second goal of mine is to utilize these new tools in collaborative Web 2.0 projects, using a wiki as the small group hub for student collaboration. In my courses students do complete research for a variety of projects, but it is of high importance that I use such a tool to prepare my students for their own futures.