Blog Post 1: Technology Strengths and Weakness

           The International Society for Technology in Education (2008) advocates a well-trained, forward looking teacher who can interface with multiple types of digital tools and incorporate them into authentic real-world lessons. This requires a teacher who has had access to the latest and most updated digital tools and who has been trained and can move easily between different types of formats and platforms.  Having been in the “trenches” of teaching for 14 years, I can say that these standards are very difficult to attain.  There will always be room for improvement because teachers are limited by the digital tools available in their schools, which are governed by administrators, school boards, and ultimately communities.  This is where creativity becomes the cornerstone to branching out of the comfort zone of the four walls of a classroom.  These standards cannot be accomplished all at once and therefore are a goal that should inspire teachers for all of their careers.

            My strengths center around “facilitating creativity,” “promoting digital citizenship,” and “Professional growth and leadership” (ISTE, 2008).  I truly want my students to tap into their own thinking abilities and have always promoted lessons that encourage this activity. Whether they were video recording Shakespeare scenes, or responding to discussion questions on our Blackboard platform, my students were actively engaged in incorporating technology into their learning.  As an English teacher, promoting digital citizenship is a primary directive.  Encouraging original work and avoiding purposeful and inadvertent plagiarism is the cornerstone of the English curriculum.  Looking for better and more effective ways to teach students all the skills they need to function in our modern world is what pushes me to continue to learn more about teaching and now to join this program for school librarianship.  My goals are to become better at adopting new ways of using digital tools to improve my effectiveness in my career in high school arena.

          Although I feel I have done a good job of incorporating digital tools in my classroom, I feel I can do better.  My weaknesses center on designing and adapting digital age learning experiences, and assessments and collaborating using digital tools (ISTE, 2008).  I feel that assessments should be different from pen and paper when given using digital tools.  While I had a student response system, it really only supported the old multiple choice testing format, which in my mind was not revolutionary.  The use of digital tools should highlight synthesized thinking and be much more than a redo of the types of assessments used for standardized tests.  Reaching out beyond my classroom walls to a global community is a new concept for the practices I used in my English classroom.  I am very interested in making every minute count and have felt that teaching under the block system limited my ability to do this.  While we engaged in reading across cultural and geographical lines, my students never participated in cross cultural or global learning experiences.  While I realize this is possible using digital tools, I have not engaged with this practice. I have dabbled in using digital tools for collaboration; however, for the most part my colleagues were not well versed in using these tools, which limited my use of them.  As a result, I feel unsure of my ability to use them easily.    I hope that this school librarianship program will help me to see the value of these practices of using digital tools to enhance assessment and collaboration and to reach beyond the walls of my school to the global community.

Reference: National Society for Technology in Education, (2008). ISTE standards: Teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards/standards-for-teachers