Continuing to Grow
Over my time in my master’s program for Educational Technology, I have grown and learned many new things. As it is coming to an end, I have been reflecting on what future learning goals I have. There are many skills that I would like to continue building on, but my main goals are narrowed down to three. I’d like to strengthen my differentiated learning strategies, provide timely and effective feedback to my students, and successfully incorporate technology tools into my lessons and my planning. These are skills that I believe will strengthen my overall ability to be a good teacher.
Enhance My Differentiated Learning Strategies
In my current teaching position, I teach many students with varying levels of knowledge and skills. Some of my students are very high achieving, and can get bored during class. Other students struggle and need more intervention and scaffolding. One goal of mine is to get better at providing a differentiated learning experience for my students so that all are supported. I want to strengthen my ability to implement different levels of instruction to meet these diverse learning needs of my students. There are many resources that I can use to support this goal, including Edutopia’s collection of tools that can provide me with several different strategies. Another resource that I would like to use more often is Diffit. Diffit is an artificial intelligence (AI) website that can create resources such as articles and vocabulary worksheets for the classroom. One of the greatest parts of this website is its ability to take one article and adjust the reading level, while keeping the important information that is needed for a lesson. In order to achieve this goal, I need to know the various levels of my students and how I can adapt my lessons to include activities and reading at each of these levels. The resources that I have listed above will help teach me these skills.
Provide Proper Feedback
In my first few years of teaching, something that I really struggled with was providing feedback in a timely, effective manner. This is something that I would like to focus on improving. When students are given feedback, it helps them understand what they are succeeding at and what they need to focus on improving. In order to help provide feedback in a timely manner, I will be looking into ways to create some pre-created comments for when I grade work online, such as using a comment library. This will be very useful when seeing patterns in my students’ work and allow me to address it without having to take too much time on it. I can also use other websites to help review the best ways of giving feedback, such as this article, which goes through several ways of giving effective feedback. These resources will support my learning in the skills of giving timely and effective feedback.
Incorporating Technology Tools Into My Lessons and Planning
Part of what I have enjoyed so much about my master’s program is all of the new technology that I have learned about and how to incorporate it into my own classroom. Technology is always changing though, so there will always be new tools to explore and new strategies to bring it into my lesson. One resource that focuses on technology in the classroom is the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework. This website provides information and additional resources for how technology, pedagogy, and content intertwine and be used well in the classroom. I will continue to review this as technology changes. I will also use other technology resources such as Magic School AI, Curipod, and Padlet as ways to incorporate new technology into my classroom. Artificial Intelligence is still relatively new right now, so by using these tools, I can explore the best strategy to use them. All of these resources will continue to strengthen my skill in bringing new technology tools into my classroom.
As an educator, it is crucial to continue to educate myself and grow to be the best teacher that I can be. These goals that I’ve outlined above are what I will be continuing to focus on, however, these goals will change over time as I grow.