My passion for technology in the classroom began 6 years ago when I jumped into an Ipad pilot program with both feet. I had always considered myself a "techie" but this first year of using technology with 36 students proved to be a turning point in my teaching career. I loved the way that technology excited my students and enhanced their learning and motivation. I developed curriculum for my science classroom that involved a variety of technology tools. My passion and excitement for technology in the classroom led me to be the Technology Liaison for the staff at my middle school. In this position I led numerous staff trainings on technology tools and blended learning. I earned my Google Certified Educator level 1 and 2 and also became a Google Certified Trainer.
I entered the Innovative Learning program with a strong background of using technology in the classroom. This program led me to reflect on tools that I have used and focus on the true purpose of using technology in the classroom which was motivating my middle school students. I am grateful of the mentors and fellow innovative teachers I have met during this program and look forward to continuing my journey to creating a 21st century classroom. My goals for this program would be to create a capstone project that encompases all of the work I have done in my classroom, not just in this program but throughout my experience of teaching in a blended classroom. I am worried that this is not an "innovative" project because I have not necessarily created anything new. I have created lessons for the last 6 years using technology but I am not honing my skills and creating a specific toolkit of what has worked with my students with the data to back it up and sample lessons that a teacher could utilize in their classroom.
I hope that my fellow cohort members can help me with ideas of what would be most useful to them as a teacher user of my capstone product. I think I can support cohort members by listening to their struggles and trying to offer ideas or solutions to their problems. I also feel pretty comfortable navigating websites and building content so I think I could be an asset to other teachers in that respect. I think we are already a great cohesive cohort but sometimes I do tend to feel a little out of the loop being the only person in the cohort from my district. I have met face to face with 2 of the members of our cohort but I would like to work outside of class with more cohort members. I also sometimes feel like the odd ball because so many teachers are focused on the elementary grade level and/or already teach at the same school and can bounce ideas off of each other much easier. I am hoping that this class bring clarity to the final project. I also hope that the project idea that is currently in my head will fit the requirements with some revisions and changes. I am looking forward to seeing everyones finished projects! My driving question has changed dramatically since the beginning of this journey. My original research was related to increasing middle school students digital literacy skills through a digital literacy unit. Research was conducted on students abilities to evaluate digital media for credibility. I developed a week long unit involving a pre and post test for my middle school students to use. In this unit I incorporated many digital tools such as padlet, flipgrid, edpuzzle, google forms and quizizz.
As a science teacher who had a large amount of content to still cover in the year, I found myself continuing to test out various digital tools in all of my lessons as well as weaving them into the hyperdocs that I was creating for my classes. I began to whittle down my list of tools to the ones that worked the best in my class for motivating students. I collected data through surveys to my students about which tools motivated them to try their hardest and which tools they simply enjoyed using. As I collected this data, I realized that many of the digital tools that worked well in my class involved students posting their work to a peer audience or tools that involved competition. My new driving question: How do digital tools and methods increase student motivation? My audience is both the students in my classroom who will benefit from tailored lessons next year as well as other middle school teachers who can access the data collected from my current students and also the lesson plans I have compiled. |