Final Reflective Post

   Over the course of this semester I have thoroughly enjoyed taking this EME 2040 class. I have learned so much about integrating technology into the classroom, and ways to help students who learn differently, and finally about all of the"behind the scenes" work that goes into teaching such as lesson planning. While you can learn a lot just through reading our textbook, I felt that our class assignments encouraged us to go above and beyond by putting what we learned  into practice and that was extremely helpful.

This class covered some very interesting subjects. The most engaging to me was when we learned about the lesson plans. I had previously known that teachers had to create lesson plans, but I had no clue how much work went into creating them for every day of the year. The chapter in the text book was very informative, but I really enjoyed that we were able to work on the collaborative lesson plan project with fellow classmates. It is one thing to read about lesson plans, it is totally different to do the work and create one yourself.

Another aspect of this class that I found very helpful and interesting was our group discussions. I found that by creating my post and then being able to read posts from my classmates really gave me an outside perspective on the assignment. It allowed me to understand other people's views on the material we had just read. The discussion that stood out the most to me was the one where we wrote about a student who had different abilities/disabilities. This discussion made such an impact because after I finished researching the disability that I wrote about, I was able to learn about other disabilities from my classmates, and to get some ideas on ways to accommodate those learners in my future class.

In this class we worked on many assignments and projects that coincided with our learning objectives.

• Communication: Some ways we worked on communication is through our blogs where we all were able to post our opinions and thoughts about our chapter. Also through our group projects like the collaborative lesson plan where we had to communicate to combine our ideas into one finished project.
• Critical Thinking: We practiced critical thinking when we found our information for our discussion posts. We also practiced it while working on our teaching portfolio and web-quest.
• Technology and Information Management: I personalty feel that we used this objective the most. We used technology management with every assignment in class, from our blogs, to our projects, to our discussion posts.
• Global Socio-Cultural Responsibility: We used this objective in our blogs and discussion posts by including our own opinions and beliefs.
• Scientific and Quantitative Reasoning: We used this objective in our web-quests, and discussion posts.

Overall I thought this course was excellent. I learned so much and feel that I have accomplished a great deal through the class assignments. The only thing that I believe would have made this class a little better is that, since I was taking this course online it was difficult to get the group projects completed in time. It was difficult to get everyone to respond to messages and then to agree on a subject for the project. SO I believe that having a few days to a week more to work on group projects would help the success of more students. Overall though I felt that this class was helpful and awesome! I feel that this video explains the concerns and support for using technology in the classroom very well!

References:

Hamilton, Paul. "Technology in Education." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2015.

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Tucker, Kayla Sky. "My EME2040 Blog." My EME2040 Blog. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2015.

 Tucker, Kayla Sky. "My Semester in EME2040." Bitstrips. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2015.


 "What Teachers Worry about." What Teachers Worry ABout. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2015.