6.2: Reflection:
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Artifact Course Reflections Blog Reflection The Course Reflections Blog is a personal blog detailing my end of course reflections per course throughout the Instructional Technology Educational Specialist program. Each entry provides insight into my learning from the course, specifically as it relates to how that learning impacted me personally and professionally. Standard 6.2 requires that candidates regularly evaluate and reflect on their learning. My doing so at the end of each semester has helped me to contextualize the purpose of each course in the grand scheme of the program and to synthesize the learning in each course to a cumulative whole. Discussions of impact on my professional practice are included in each post. For example, the Advanced Study of Learning post demonstrates my summarized understanding of feedback, motivation, and self-regulation, ideas critical to understanding why learners do what they do in the classroom and how to help them do what they should in order to expand their minds. Standard 6.2 also requires that candidates regularly evaluate and reflect on their dispositions. The Professional Learning and Technology post discusses my disheartening struggles with engaging teachers in easy, useful, powerful technology innovations. The post details three specific assignments for which I dealt with that teacher reluctance, sometimes outright laugh-it-off refusal, but ultimately concludes with the axiomatic notion that anything worth doing is bound to be difficult. If it were easy, it would be done already. In the post, I discuss how one powerful project in particular, the technology workshop, elicited a weak turnout despite multifaceted marketing. Survey results from the five attendees, however, indicated that they found the workshop content meaningful and that most have implemented the Google Forms as assessment tool strategy, proving that although getting teachers to hear innovations out is a struggle, many are willing to try new approaches given appropriate modeling and facilitation. Dispositions relevant specifically to my ability to effectively model and facilitate technology-enhanced learning experiences is also critical to this standard, and evidence demonstrating my regular reflection on that skill development is discussed in the Internet Tools in the Classroom post. Detailed therein is my semester-long struggle with and ultimate success overcoming nervousness about sharing my developing expertise with colleagues. Initially nervous to share my Internet Tools blog posts because I felt a bit of a charlatan, I forced myself to share anyway and received positive feedback rom my colleagues. That feedback combined with the depth of exploration in the course encouraged a positive shift in my disposition. Completing these reflections at the end of each course made the methodology behind the overall design of the program salient for me. Depth in study of the basics -- what 21st century learning means, both UDL (CAST, 2015) and the ADDIE model's (Culatta, 2013) significance, and the study of learning itself -- were necessarily prerequisite to subsequent courses, which employed that learning and expanded upon it. Looking back, including information in each post about how the previous courses' learning applied to each course's met goals would have provided greater depth of insight for myself and my readers. Although these reflections did not directly influence school improvement, faculty development, or student learning, they did enhance my professional practice and dispositions as well as discuss my developing ability to influence each. As I return to North Cobb High School to teach this fall, the impact of this enhancement will be determined by my ability to implement the strategies with students and to inspire my colleagues to integrate collaborative technology by demonstrating my students' success. References CAST. (2015). About UDL: Learn the basics. National Center on Design for Learning. Retrieved from http://www.udlcenter.org/aboutudl Culatta, R. (2013). ADDIE model. Retrieved from http://www.instructionaldesign.org/models/addie.html |