Educational Technology Program

Reflection When I reflect on this course, I can’t believe that we are already at the end of it!  When I first saw that we were doing an eLearning course, I wasn’t sure what the word, “eLearning” meant.  We have been learning about new tech tools in our other classes, so I thought we had already learned what “eLearning” was.  I didn’t know how much more there was! When I look at the 4 C’s of technology ( Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, and Creativity), this course definitely has shown me ways to incorporate these pillars into my teaching!  I have always wanted to know more about Project Based Learning.  This course showed me a way to have my students think more creatively and more critically.  By incorporating more PBL into my teaching, I can get my students to collaborate with each other, think critically about certain curriculum topics, and are able to communicate their findings with many different technology tools.   O...

eLearning Unit Assessment Assessment and Rubrics Giving purposeful feedback to our students and to our colleagues is a very valuable tool.  It helps us get our students/colleagues to start thinking differently or helping them "wonder" about different things that they might not have before.  The artifact that I chose to share that is part of my eLearning Unit plan are my assessments and rubrics.  For one assessment, I am having students fill out a Google Form toward the beginning and then again at the end of the unit.  They will be discussing their thoughts on the essential questions of the unit.  I will be sharing this Google Form with them on the Google Classroom platform I will be using throughout my unit. Creating a Google Form was very easy.  I am very familiar with the tool and it is very easy to distribute to the students by adding a link to our Google Classroom platform.  The thing that I really like about Google Forms is that it creates ...

Reflecting on My Learning Flipped Lesson I've always heard of teachers moving to a "flipped classroom", but I never knew what that all entailed.  We have a teacher at our school who has flipped his whole math class and he always tell us what kind of success he gets with it.  I've always been intrigued but I've never had the time to really learn about the benefits that a flipped classrooms could have and what it takes to get your classroom that way.  My flipped lesson promotes communication to the students.  By using a video for the main lesson, students are able to practice and look back at the video lesson as many times as they need to.  It's a way to continue to communicate their main objective of the lesson. When I reflect on making my flipped math lesson, I think about how it was hard for me to do at first.  I feel weird recording my own voice and sharing a video I created.  It made me stop and think about how my students must feel when I...

Reflecting On My Learning Understanding by Design In this unit I designed, it focused on the topic of Social Emotional Learning.  I feel this topic is so important to emphasize in the classroom.  There are so many times that I have students coming up to me and asking me questions on how to handle a social situation.  In fourth grade, students are starting to gain an understanding that their actions (whether positive or negative) can affect people. I really enjoyed making this unit plan because I feel like it can be really beneficial for my students and our school.   Being able to create my own Project Based Learning lesson during this course has been very educational.  I have always wanted to incorporate more PBL into my classroom.  Looking back on this lesson, a challenge that I might face is not getting well developed questions from my students to use in their Google Forms.  The more I look back on the lesson,  I am going to have to ...

When looking back on the Effective Technology Integration course I just finished, I really feel that I have learned a lot.  Previous to this course, I have always wanted to do more Project Based Learning in my classroom.  I’ve wanted to get my students to do more collaborative work and I’ve wanted to focus on building essential questions into my classroom.  In this course, I really was able to dive into learning about PBL and create my own plan.  I think by creating my own plan, it really helped me think through the process and how I could implement this into my classroom.  I am very excited to do my PBL lesson that I created at the beginning of my next school year! I’ve grown as an educator because of all the beneficial discussions we have had as a class.  I think one of the best ways to learn as an educator is to hear about what other teachers are doing and creating for their classrooms.  I love how we were able to share our PBL plans with each ...

Flipping a classroom has been a topic that I continue to learn more about.  We have a teacher in our school who has completely flipped his math classroom and has seen a lot of success with it.  By flipping your classroom, students can take more control over their learning.  They can watch the lesson at home, and then come to school prepared with questions they may be having.  When a lesson is traditionally done in the classroom, some students might not get a chance to be heard.  By having them watch the lesson at home, it gives students time to really think of authentic questions.  Another advantage of flipping your classroom is giving the teacher more time to work with their struggling students.  Teachers can see which students are struggling and spend their time working with those students, instead of physically teaching the lesson for the class during the day.   A challenge I see with flipping a classroom is the time commitment...