Blog #3: Final Reflections

 In the past 8 days of class, I feel as though I have learned so much and honed skills in many programs that I had been familiar with before the course.  Although my head was spinning a bit at times, I feel as though I have been introduced to so many new things that I can really integrate into my class.  The top things that comes to mind are podcasts, blogs, universal design, GoogleDocs, GoogleBookmarks, and open-source software.

I really appreciated the project for this course.  Since I had already had something in mind for adding technology for next year, I was able to use my idea (portfolio blogs) and build it based on what we learned in class.  I liked how open-ended it was to design for something that I would really use in my classroom, not requiring us to use webquests (which I would be less likely to use in my class) but yet orienting us to how to use a variety of programs.

If I'm honest, I have not always been a teacher who integrated lots of technology into my classroom.  Part of this is because I am teaching a foreign language, and my teaching is based on very basic communication.  So many of the things that educators take for granted at higher grades (e.g. "Okay, kids, write down some ideas you have about this topic" or "Read this authentic website") simply won't work in my classroom because my students' vocabulary is very limited.  However, being introduced to some new elements of technology has helped me think that I really can use technology in my classroom to enhance communication and apply real-life situations.

In the future, I am absolutely going to use my CIP idea of portfolio blogs in my 7th grade class.  I am confident this will help them develop their reading and writing skills, two things that are rather hard to motivate middle schoolers to practice in authentic situations that won't make them look silly.  I am excited to use Prezi instead of PowerPoint to mix things up in my lessons that require more visuals to support understanding of the new vocabulary.  As I progress, I would like to find more ways to allow students to use technology at their appropriate level of language ability.

One issue that I am still figuring out how to deal with is how easy it is when students use the internet to just click a button and translate entire web pages or translate their own words into Spanish without actually applying what they have learned in class.  I see a value in GoogleTranslate (although I never use it myself; I prefer using online dictionaries, not rote translation), but I want my students to be able to communicate without needing to rely on technology to express themselves.  But then I open my email in Spanish and see Google's helpful offer to translate everything into English for me and wonder about what my students would do in a similar situation.  How can I train them to see technology as a language resource but not as a crutch?  This will certainly be an issue that comes up as students use their personal laptops more in my class.