The 21st-Century Teacher

When I joined EDUC 6710I-2: Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society on September 2013, I had a hope that I would get a lot of practical skills that I can directly apply to my teaching and learning. I was busy working, therefore, practical skills which can be directly applied to my teaching and learning will be beneficial for me. Now, as we are coming to the end of this course, I can conclude that I have a lot from the course. The resources provided help me a lot in my teaching and learning. The interaction that I had with my colleagues also help me a lot as a teacher. This course taught me about using different media to understand the impact of technology on education, work, and society. At the beginning of the course unit on blog, I thought that I knew about blog. I ended up getting a lot of improvements on how to use blogs more effectively. I had never used Wikis before. I heard it but chose not to explore more. As this was one of the course unit, I had to learn it. At the end, I enjoyed doing it, but I would prefer to use blog, still. Podcasting was completely new for me. I had never done any podcasting before until I joined this course. I am glad that in this course I learned about podcasting because this can be a powerful tool for teaching and learning at my work. RSS was also something new for me. I like the idea of using RSS. It is so simple and yet it is so beneficial.

This course has helped me to understand that we as teachers must use technology to do different things. I learned that some technologies allow us to do things differently while others allow us to do different things. I learned that expanding technologies can influence society at large, and this bring impacts to my classroom practice. I learned the role of technologies in building the 21^st-century skills. I learned, developed and evaluated different ways in which I can make changes in my classroom environment in order to integrate the teaching of 21^st-century skills using technology. 

I have known about learner-centered because my school where I work applies this system. Even though it was not new for me, through this course, I have learned more on how to teach using the learner-centered system. I need to include my students when I am planning for a lesson. I should start from their prior knowledge and expand their knowledge and skills from that starting point.

I think that just because this course is about finished does not mean that I should stop learning on how to integrate technology into my teaching and learning practice at my work. This course has inspired more of my hunger toward technology usage to make life easier.

For my goals, within the next two years, I would like to integrate more and more technologies into my teaching and learning. I believe that technologies are developing more and more. Therefore, I should have not missed that development. The challenges will be still about budgeting. On the other hand, I believe that I would find ways to solve the problem that include budgeting. The second goal will be to learn more about the usage of technologies and how to apply it in my classroom practices. I believe that I learned more by doing it. Therefore, I would like to share my ideas to my colleagues whenever I can. I believe that when we share our knowledge and skills to others, we can learn more.