Blog Reflection 1

I have posted my philosophy and concept maps in the 2 previous posts. Due to the length of my philosophy statement, I decided to separate the posts for ease of reading and understanding.

Writing the philosophy statement helped provide me an organized foundation moving forward. As a technology teacher and instructional technology coordinator, I have had lots of loose ideas running around in my head for quite some time. To begin to organize those was very helpful. My reflection is currently in a work in progress state and will need a lot of simplication and refinement, but I was pulling from so many areas I did not want to leave anything out. I hope that it will give me guidance moving forward in my career.

I have my MFA in Arts and Technology from UT Dallas. During course work for this degree, multiple classes required me to blog. I strongly agree with the article we read discussing that once it was required, it was no longer really blogging. I love to read, especially from great minds in a field. I will read books, blogs and twitter posts from people that I find interesting. Unfortunately, I have never been into writing. I agree it is important and helps in the learning process. Beyond meeting requirements, I have only kept one blog for myself and it was based on training for an endurance event.

I have heard varying levels of success stories of blogging within classrooms. I believe all of the unknowns and security worries a lot of teachers. I do believe it is important and will continue to grow.

The Alan November article area that stood out to me the most was the first one, if it is on the internet it is true. I heard Mr. November speak in Spring of 2012 and he taught a very interesting lesson on this. As a computer teacher I have seen this first hand. It is, as he mentioned, a temptation to lull people into not thinking. We need to teach students to discriminate among information and to still think for themselves.

My expectations for the class are to learn some new technologies and how they are being used within education. Any information on combining technology and instruction, training of staff, or integrating technology will be helpful. I'm also interested the informating over automating. Currently I am in a 3 session program led by Alan November and have just become my district's Instructional Technology Coordinator. This is my only EdTech class at TAMU-C so I am very excited about it and looking forward to it and how everything going on will mesh together for me.