Personal Growth Plan Reflection

My Personal Growth Plan centered around learning Web 2.0 applications better, and I feel that this course has really helped me to do that. I have gained extensive knowledge of blogs, RSS, ning, twitter, and many other types of online software that I will definitely be implementing in the classroom is some way, shape, or form. When it comes to integrating technology in the classroom, I have learned plenty of methods in which I could use to further students skills with technology. Firstly, through doing our group project online with collaborative web 2.0 software, I have learned how to plan, create, and edit presentations without direct communication due to geographic location difference. I think these skills will benefit me in communication with classroom teachers when I do start my job in communicating and designing lesson plans that most benefit the students technology skills and their classroom learning. I have also learned plenty of interesting software that my students could use in creating projects such as prezi and blogger. I will be employing these types of software to both keep my classes organized and having students create through these mediums.

I feel as though angel is a great platform to teach this course through because at its core Angel is somewhat of a Web 2.0 application, which a large portion of this class focused on. Using the internet for most of our portfolio projects, whether that be social media, web 2.0 apps, or flickr, really emphasized the shift in technology towards web and cloud based computing and shifted my focus of teaching towards using these technologies to benefit students. I think that the RSS blog post was a great project because it incorporated blogs, rss feeds, screenshots, and other types of technology to create. This forced me to learn many new types of technology all at once, something that I really appreciated as in quickly caught me up to the demands of this course. Any assignment that used blogger was great because everything was posted online in a shareable area that all of our classmates could observe and enjoy. I also thought the forum communication on Angel is a great method of communication and it helps students educate and learn from other students, which reenforces our own knowledge that we already learned. The adobe presentations were also a great forum to ask questions, share knowledge, and communicate with one another. The main thing that I have taken away from this course in the capabilities of technology today in the realms of communication and collaboration. There are so many resources online to publish ideas, read opinions, and peer-review other professionals work.

I feel that I have gone above and beyond my expectations for myself in many regards. I have learned a great deal about Web 2.0 applications and their abilities in learning technology. The student presentations also really expanded my knowledge in specific areas such as tablet learning and technology for those with disabilities. I think those projects were a great capstone to everything we have learned in this course because they went outside of the learning in this class and really showed all of the areas of technology that are out there. Overall, I thought this was a great course because I really did learn a lot in the realm of technology in education.