Podcast

Podcast Interview

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Final Reflection

The past eight weeks I have been given a tremendous amount of knowledge about adapting to our 21st century society of students and becoming ready and more effective for these changes. Robert Hof (2007) explained over the next decade, the relentless march of computer power and Net connection speeds will bring more profound changes to work than anything we’ve seen so far. This course has provided me a number of different skills and resources to take into my own classroom and now allow me to be able give these tools to my students to help them succeed.
I have deepened my knowledge of teaching and the learning process by being a learner myself. When first entering this class I had heard about blogs, wikis, and podcasts but I was not sure exactly how they work and had no idea that we could ever incorporate them into our curriculum. After getting a great deal of experience and learning about all three technological categories I feel pretty comfortable with including some of these pieces of technology into my Physical Education curriculum.
My perspective from a teacher to a learner has changed because in order to get through to my students I need to change the way I think and put my mind as a learner. I need to be able to see and feel what the students are engaged in and what things they are being interested in. To be a good teacher you need to be involved in what your students think and how they feel and be flexible to make you more powerful as an educator to get through to your students and help them be successful and show them that you care about their needs and wants. In order to continue to grow and expand as a teacher I need to always be ready and able to change. Change to help my students, to give them the things they need to learn and be flexible and inventive with the things they want to learn. Technology is a great way to keep your students involved and always being aware and flexible is a very strong way to keep them engaged.
In my classroom within the next couple years I want to incorporate more technology. Being in Physical Education it is hard to incorporate a lot of technology because technology is a big part of why are students are not being active at home and a big contributor to our obesity rate. I want technology to go hand and hand with Physical Education to not only make it healthier for our students but to also make it fun and a cool thing to do. A good example of this is the new things the Wii is allowing at homes. It is making video games more interactive and is played by people actually moving around and being active. This is a fun and cool concept that has attracted our world, this is what I would like to include someday within my Physical Education program. Not exactly a Wii, but a fun way to get students excited and involved with physical activity and not just in my gymnasium for a few days a week.
After looking back at this eight week course I feel the changes that I have developed are just the things I want to try to incorporate into my classroom in the future. Teachers need training in instructional technology and 21st century skills so they can learn how to embed these skills into their classroom and also have a support system (Miners & Pascopella, 2007).  I want to have more time to do different things and still get my physical education in. I am not given enough time as it is to fulfill a lot of the things I would like to and for a lot of students it is the only physical activity they will get throughout the week. With more time in my program I could incorporate cooler things for my students to get them excited about living healthy and happy lifestyles.

References

Hof, R. (2007, August 20). The end of work as you know it. Businessweek.com. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047426.htm?chan =search

Miners, Z., & Pascopella, A. (2007). The new literacies. District Administration, 43(10), 26–34


 

No comments:

Post a Comment