Personal Learning Reflection

I sought out the MSU Educational Technology program because I am planning on getting back into teaching in a classroom setting next school year.  As I started thinking about this process, the one aspect of my professional life that I felt needed the most work was involvement.  In my current job, I felt like an outsider when it came to the education world at large, and addressing these feelings is at the root of most of the goals I expressed earlier in my Professional Growth Plan.  Looking back, I am confident that I made the right decision.

One of the most valuable aspects of this course has been interacting with other members of the course and the larger educational community.  I am not naturally an outgoing person, but this course required me to begin to make a presence for myself online.  The activities in the first few sessions made me get out there and make a blog, join networks, use Twitter, follow the blogs of other educators, and post my first ever profile picture online; this was just what I needed.  I feel more connected now, more a member of a community of educators, sharing ideas, encouragement, and solutions.

Collaborating with three of my classmates in coming up with a SIG presentation was also an important learning experience.  It felt good to share ideas with fellow educators and learn from their experiences.  This process also involved some genuine, necessary problem solving, as we had to work around schedules, time zones, and personalities.  It felt good to get through some initial difficulties in communication, and really pull together as a team by the end.  I learned a great deal about the capabilities of technology to foster collaboration regardless of geography.  The most important concrete lesson I will take from this experience is that voice communication is unquestionably preferable to text communication, when it is possible.

Through the independent activities, I discovered some excellent online resources that I probably never would have come across otherwise.  I found myself examining my views and opinions, and delving in to creative parts of my brain that have been underused recently. I had loads of fun creating a comic for the PLN assignment, I was impressed with the capabilities of Prezi during the SIG activities, and creating my first screencast for the Personal Technology Plan really gave me concrete experience in a technology I plan on using in my classroom.  I am excited to keep exploring and finding resources to do things I am not even thinking about yet.

Overall, I feel like I have met, or am in the process of meeting, the goals I set out in my Professional Growth Plan at the beginning of this course.  Additionally, and to my delight, I have come across new ideas that have given me new goals to work for.  I now have a more definite vision of what me teaching in a classroom could look like.  At the top of the list of these new ideas is the flipped classroom model.  Researching and learning about this innovation has given me a clear sense of how I can incorporate technology in my classroom teaching, but more importantly, it provides a bridge between the work I do now and the work I hope to be doing soon.  All of the experiences this course has provided have eased my anxiety and whetted my appetite for what is coming next.

Learning Styles

I have always learned best when I have an instructor who is excited about what he or she is teaching.  Seeing someone who is interested and invested in the information I am learning benefits me, because I can often be pretty skeptical on the front end.  A good sense of humor in the presentation of material is always nice.

I am often reluctant to step outside my comfort zone, but I recognize that I retain knowledge better when I am asked (or required) to go a little beyond what I am comfortable with.  This is one of the things I am enjoying about this course: I would have never started a blog, got on twitter, or explored RSS feeds on my own, but having to do it for a class has given me the opportunity to see the value in these activities and expand my own learning.  

I completed the Learning Style Inventory on the PSU website, and it returned that I am a visual-tactile learner.  Makes sense to me: I get more from charts and graphs than from straight text; I retain better from hands-on experiences; my most memorable and lasting educational experiences are ones where I was involved in some activity.  

It is true that we can’t teach to every distinct learning style, so my approach has always been openness and diversity.  I try to keep my outlook flexible and stay open to trying new things to reach my students.  For me, the best way to do this has been to constantly seek input and feedback from my students.  When they do a math problem, I ask what their though process was; this is especially helpful in error correction, and it allows me to tailor my instruction to individual needs.  I advocate using as many different avenues as possible when my students are trying to learn new things: write it down, read it out loud, talk to someone else about it, listen to someone else describe how they do it, draw a diagram, etc.  My hope is that this will touch on the strengths of all students, while also allowing them to explore a variety of learning styles.  I think it is helpful to recognize your strengths, but important to constantly work on your weaknesses. 

Creative Commons

I've recently been working on a series of problems involving hot air balloons with a student.  He has an uncle who is an enthusiast, and it seemed like a good way to hook him in to the subject matter.  This is an image of a couple of hot air balloons I found on Creative Commons.

 
Photo Attribution:

 Original Image: "Weezie's Birthday Ballooning"
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardgiles/3613705218/
Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

The most common way I use images in my teaching is to make sure the students know what I'm talking about, especially when the material we're covering references something outside of everyday life.  I work with some students who have gotten used to hiding the fact that they don't understand what is going on in class.  I got caught dealing with this lack of understanding a few times when I started working with these students, so now I find it helpful to illustrate situations with images on the front end.  It helps alleviate some of the potential embarrassment, and can spark interesting discussions.

Here's a photo of a strange flower from the Democratic Republic of Congo that I took when I visited my parents there a few years ago.

From congo