501 Course Reflection

This course, titled Introduction to Educational Technology, was designed to provide a basic overview of the field, including how to understand rising trends, how to evaluate an institution's use of technology, and how to analyze key issues within the field.  This course also gave me a foundation of the skills which will be required moving forward in the MET program, including screencasting, principles of effective academic presentations, and research techniques.

This course has also provided me some valuable insights.  This course required the use of several tools I was already familiar with and showed me, very directly and concretely, how they can be effectively applied in an educational setting.  For example, I have seen a few colleagues use social networks as a tool for communicating with their students.  In this course, we used Google+ for not only communication, but for active collaboration with our peers.  This experience has given me a new perspective; the changes to how social networks are used in this course compared to my prior experience are simple, but have added a powerful element to the course.  I am now energized to reexamine other familiar technologies to consider how I could use them more effectively in my classroom.

At the start of this course, I was skeptical about the likelihood of building a community in an online course.  This semester was my first experience taking any courses online and I've spoken to a number of people who found their experience with online coursework to be very impersonal and, as a result, have been very hesitant to participate in efforts to offer online courses in the district where I teach.  The structure of this course provided a framework for interaction that was a stark contrast to what I'd been lead to expect.  The requirement to post assignments to a Google+ community, the use of small groups, and the clear expectations for participation are strategies that could easily be adapted to other online courses and have me much more interested in offering an online component to the courses I teach.

 I expect that, over the next few semesters, I will continue to see technology and my classroom in a new light.  These perspectives, and the important skills that come with them, will continue to improve my classroom practice and allow me to be a more valuable asset to my district as we increase our integration of technology.