Monday, March 15, 2010

Improving Educational Technology Integration.

I am focusing on areas where I feel I need improvement in my usage and implementation of technology based-education. Specifically, I am working on a plan to specifically identify weakness areas and improve my own fluency so I may be better prepared to teach my students and effectively lead by example.
Of the five NETS-T standards, I definitely feel the least comfortable with standard number 4, Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility and number 5, Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership. In order to increase my confidence in these standards, I have set the following goals for myself:

A) Learn the necessary citation protocol for digital information and technology usage.
B) Develop a reasonable strategy for maximizing student access to technology, hardware and software in my learning environments
C) Learn how to work collaboratively and effectively with networked tools so I can pass this knowledge on to my students.
D) Make greater effort to communicate and collaborate with people through remote communication tools so I may become more proficient and comfortable and learn to escape the "lone island" mentality.
E) Make a definite effort to model collaborative and networked technology usage in constructive and meaningful ways so students can see the value of technological collaborative projects.
F) Find and subscribe to professional journals that can help me keep abridged of new developments in the field of educational technology.
G) Provide materials and aid to other teachers around me in order to help them become more comfortable with the tools, software and opportunities that continue to appear around us.

These goals should help me to improve my fluency in the NETS-T standards that I'm least comfortable with. In order to actually reach these goals, I'll need to put a few things in motion. First off, I'll need to find a better source book for APA format and citation. I'm not really comfortable with the materials I currently have and would like soemthing a bit clearer and more thorough. I'll also need to research some professional journals or blog-sites that can help me with current technological trends and opportunities so I can stay up to speed on new developments.
I need to commit more to communicating through blogs, chat sessions and message boards in order to improve my fluency. Using my RSS reader more faithfully to keep abridged of updates on some of my current tracked feeds would also help.
It is also important that I include a segment in my lesson-planning process for technology implementation and simply force myself to consider how I might implement technology in more of my lessons. Simply modifying my lesson-plan template could provide me a concrete reminder so I continue to focus on working technology into my lessons more effectively. I should also consider featuring a section of my blog-site on technology integration so I can highlight things I've tried as well as receive suggestions from other visitors about how they've used technology. This can help me as well as serve as a resource for some of the teachers around me as well as provide a good knowledge base for myself as I continue to improve my technology integration.
I think a good way of self-monitoring my progress in these areas would be to create a chart that would allow me to review my progress in my goals and action areas every two or three months. This would allow me to verify if I'm actually fulfilling my goals and working on the action items I've created. If I see that some items are simply not being fulfilled, I can review the goals and determine why I'm reticent to work on them. For those goals that I have improved on I can identify which actions were successful and perhaps find ways to modify my less attractive checklist items to come more in focus with activites that were successful for me. Once I see what things work well versus what things don't I should be able to modify my plan to give myself a better chance at maintaining the checklist and improving myself in my skill areas.

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