EdTech 543 Final Reflection

This course was the first course that I have taken as part of my graduate studies. I decided to complete this graduate program as I wanted to further my career and be able to find new ways to implement technology into my teaching. I feel it has been very beneficial and opened my eyes to many ways that social media can be used for both my professional development as well as in my classroom.

Throughout the many assignments when we were given the leeway to choose our own direction on a project I was very intentional in choosing a topic that I felt could directly relate to my practice. In terms of professional development, there were many times I did this that I felt opened my eyes and have set me up with resources to use in the future. One resource that I have discovered through this process was Twitter. In setting up a Tweetdeck I am able to follow pertinent hashtags to the courses and course levels that I teach. I am very interested to see the activity on these hashtags at the time that the courses are taking place as a means of hopefully sharing necessary resources as they would be needed. I also will try to be active in Twitter chats for the same reasons during the school year. I also love the idea of being able to choose webinars that I could find beneficial and the possible future they have as a new way of professional development.

I also made sure to choose topics I would find helpful in finding resources that I could implement in my classroom. In the couple of times that we used curation I truly took it as a time to compile resources that I can pull from in teaching this year. A couple of areas I would like to do this would be through PBL and social media implementation. Due to working with my PLN who had similar interests in creating a social networked mini unit, the subject matter that we used could directly tie into my teaching and be activities that I use in my instruction.

I feel I have stayed on top of my blogging in this class. I have completed every blog and have done each on time. I have also put the time in while blogging to reflect on each topic thoroughly. Therefore, for my blogging, I would give myself a 75/75.