When
assessing my technology strengths and weaknesses, I would say I have more
strengths that weaknesses, but I definitely still have plenty to learn. For the majority of things that deal with
technology, I would say that I am pretty comfortable with using them, or at
least learning how to use them with practice.
However, I do occasionally come across something that intimidates or
frustrates me with technology.
I’ve
grown up around technology most of my life.
My dad had a computer at home for his job for as long as I can remember,
my elementary school was equipped with computer labs, I spend my middle school
years waiting on dialup to connect to AOL, and by high school I was using the
internet for research papers. Since I
began teaching, technology has been a component I had to use for both personal
use and in lessons. Technology use in
the classroom is even a portion of my yearly teacher rating. Therefore, I really do not remember a time I
have not had to adapt, adjust, and learn more about technology to keep up with
the times and be successful with whatever it was that was being asked of me at
that stage of life. I would certainly
describe this adaptability and willingness to learn as a strength of mine.
According
to the ISTE Standards, I would describe myself as strong in modeling digital
age work and learning, promoting and modeling digital citizenship and
responsibility, and engaging in professional growth and leadership.
I am
constantly using technology components in my classroom and modeling these for
my students. I have set up classroom
blogs, a classroom website, and we have a technology station in our literacy
station portion of the day. Also, I love
to be able to demonstrate to my students how technology adds value to their
life. Whenever the opportunity arises, I
will use my Smartboard to demonstrate whatever it is that we might be
discussing and how they can use technology to help them. I also use technology to communicate with
parents and colleagues. My parents sign
up for conferences online, we are in constant email contact, and they can go to
my website for any important information.
In
our classroom, we also discuss Internet safety, the importance of siting a
source (as much as a third grader can understand this), and I attempt to
provide all students with equal access to the technology we use. I am fortunate to have technology available
on my campus to do so for them.
As
mentioned before, I am always seeking to grow professionally when it comes to
technology. I have attended several
workshops that my district offers about technology use in the classroom. This degree has even helped me to participate
in a learning community with others. I
have found myself collaborating with others and making new friends so that we
can better learn the coursework and become more successful librarians. As I enter my position as a librarian, I
fully intend to keep up this network of communication and be a leader for
collaborating with the teachers on my campus.
As
with anything in life, there are things I could grow in when it comes to
technology. When looking over the ISTE
Standards, I felt that facilitating and inspiring student learning and
creativity and designing and developing age learning experiences and
assessments would be where I am weaker.
I am
confident in my ability to provide my students with opportunities to be
creative. However, there are always so
many new technology components coming out, that I find it difficult sometimes
to stay on top of the latest and greatest thing to let my students use. Fortunately, as I enter my job as a librarian
this coming school year, I get to work closely with the technology
department. We have a campus technology
liaison and I know I will learn many things from him that I can incorporate in
to library lessons.
Creating
digital assessments is something I find especially difficult. I have spend the last six years in a world of
paper and pencil state testing, so I have always found it hard to help eight
year olds transfer knowledge from technology to testing in that format. I whole-heartedly wish this wasn’t the case
but it was hard to get around that. I am
hopeful that from my library position I will learn ways to assist teachers in
this realm. I do believe that I can
develop a technology rich learning environment in the library with the help of this
class, our technology liaison, and other technology savvy people on my
campus. Fortunately, I am not
intimidated to ask for help and I love collaboration.
I’ve
already mentioned a variety of things that I would like to learn about
technology in order to improve my instructional strategies, but in addition to
these things, I would love to learn more about using tablets for instructional
technology. I am going to have 12 Ipads
in my library next year and would love to learn how to best utilize them to
maximize student learning. Also, I am
fortunate enough to inherit a Makerspace grant that my previous librarian
received. I am attending a conference
this summer to better understand how to utilize this and I was also excited to
see this as assignment. I plan to use
this next year in the library and look forward to learning more about this as
well as all of the other new and exciting technology pieces!
References
International
Society for Technology in Education. (2008). ISTE Standards. Teachers.
Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/docs/pdfs/20-14_ISTE_Standards-T_PDF.pdf
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