Friday, December 13, 2013

Technology Integration: What I've learned


Before this class, I had managed two personal blogs for fun but had been trying to figure out a way to implement them successfully into a classroom. Blogger was not the platform I had chosen to work on before, so it was interesting to see how it worked. However, I don’t think that I will be continuing my classroom blog on it. Being used to Wordpress I found that Blogger lacked some of the simple formatting features that I commonly used.
This class introduced me to Rubistar, a rubric creation site. I absolutely love this site! It has tons of premade rubrics, categories, and ideas! I love how easy it is to start with a basic rubric on the site and tweak it as needed to fit your project. Rubrics were always a dreaded task for me because I never knew how to word the differences between the grading categories, but this site is letting me use more and more in my classroom!
Education World’s website had a list of easy and quick ways to use technology more often in your classroom. This quick list was full of great ideas that are easy to implement. It is surprising how often we can use digital resources to replace or supplement all the written work and textbooks we use! (http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech146.shtml )

This class has helped me analyze my use of technology and work to use more in my classroom. It has also given me some ways to use the limited technology available to our students. Technology needs to be used often to create comfort and allow students to develop proficiency with it.  It also needs to be used productively to assist our curriculum and state standards to help create student growth.