Reflection

After reviewing my Personal Theory of Learning that I developed during week 1 of this course, I still feel very much the same way. However, I would like to add in much more technology use into my daily lessons to help stimulate my students' minds and help them to become more engaged in the learning process. I am a strong believer that learning is an active process, and I think it is so important to keep students engaged in what they are learning. I think adding more technology into my lessons can be a great way to get my students engaged.

Immediate adjustments that I will make to my instructional practice will definitely be to integrate more technology into my lessons. "Educational technology is a support for teaching and learning that both teacher and learned can call on to help ensure the opportubity for optimum performance" (Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2008, p. 28). The first technology tool that I am definitely going to integrate into my classroom next year will be a classroom blog where students will go to post comments/questions and/or responses to given prompts that all center around our classroom lessons. A second technology that I would like to integrate into my classroom instruction is Voice Threads. I can see how I could use a Voice Thread in my classroom in many ways. I would like to use it to review material already learned in the classroom so that students can use it for additional help. I would also like to use a Voice Thread to give students prompts to respond to.

The first long-term goal that I have for changing my instructional practice is to begin to use technology in the classroom more so that I am more of a mediator while my students actively learn through the use of technology because "integrating technology into instruction tends to move classrooms from teacher-dominated environments to ones that are more student-centered" (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn. & Malenoski, 2007, p.3). A second long-term goal that I have is to get students more excited about math through the use of technology in the classroom. To achieve both of these goals will mean continuing to learn about the best technologies that are available to me and my students and learning how to use them so that I can integrate them into the classroom.

References

Lever-Duffy, J. & McDonald, J. (2008). Theoretical Foundations (Laureate Education, Inc., custom ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.