Week #1 Reflection

I had a very confusing first week of Summer I sessions because I have Dr. Wickersham for HEID 595 and ETEC 524; therefore, I had to double check on assignments due for each class. Hopefully, I will get it straight soon!

I believe writing my philosophy was the most time consuming of this week assignment. After reading all the links to the different theories, I successfully settle with Constructivism. I found myself agreeing to many of the bullets under the Constructivism theory. Having written my education technology on paper, I have a better understanding of my expectations not only of my students but of myself also. The educational philosophy gave me an insight of what I have to improve in my professional development so my students can benefit from my knowledge and skills.

After reading Stephen Downes’ article on Educational Blogging, I was amazed about the integration of technology in today’s education. The potential to connect with the entire world and not your immediate learning community to view your writing is mind blowing. Also, I do never think that blogging can bring equity to students; regardless of their personalities every student has a voice. Students can access teacher’s instructions and others writing, share their own thoughts, etc. is a wonderful. However, I don’t believe that we have reached the potential of educational blogging due to the school antivirus and teachers’, parents’ and administrators’ previous experiences with blogging.

Creating a Culture for Teaching and Learning was a very insightful. The validity of information on the Internet stood out of all the six outline areas. It is true that students believe everything they read on the Internet; therefore, as parents and teachers we have the responsibility to teach our students to decipher the information they retrieved from the Internet.

I enjoyed using Wordle as my application for the Concept Map assignment; I found myself having too much fun after several changes of layouts, fonts, and colors. My concept map is a representation of my view of Educational Technology which is much of internet, theories, wikis, etc. The map as a whole is plus more is my personal interpretation of educational technology.