Just like everything I do, my 20% project has taken me all over the place. I started out with creating a class website. This has been a goal of mine for years and I had started it a while ago, but just never really got it up and running, so I used a good share of my 20% project time on adding to and personalizing my site. I also wanted to start a class Blog to share things that we were doing in class with parents. I set up the blog, but decided to wait until next school year to start adding posts as it seemed like a more natural place to start for me. I also spent some time creating YouTube playlists to accompany literacy and math lessons and science/health units that I teach throughout the year. I also created a playlist of videos to use as greetings, transitions, and just for fun. I also just took some time to just explore the many web tools available and thinking of ways in which I could integrate those tools into the first grade curriculum. A few of my favorites were Wordle, Little Bird Tales, and GlogsterEDU.
Taking these Teaching and Technology courses has helped me to grow a lot as a teacher. I have completely changed in the way I approach my lesson planning and instruction. I sadly have to admit that before taking these courses, I rarely thought about ways in which to incorporate technology into my instruction. When I got a SMARTBoard last year and began using the SMART software to create lessons, I finally started to think of technology as more of a tool, rather than simply entertainment. I feel that the 20% Project assignment helped me meet the second NETS*T standard because it forced me to take the time to start thinking about ways in which to integrate technology into my instruction and and research tools that I did not even know existed as a means of providing a technology rich experience for my students.
One of the most valuable things I took from this course was the fact that my role as a teacher of very young students is to simply to expose them to and model for them how to use technology tools. I had always felt very limited in the technology that I could incorporate into my lessons because of the limited skills of my students. I felt liberated to know that my main role in teaching technology to my students is to model for them how to use technology tools, not to expect them to be able to use them independently. This realization alone has helped me meet the third NETS*T standard because I am able to find more ways in which to integrate technology into my instruction because I think of it as a means of exposing students to ways in which technology can be used which gives me a broader range of tools that I can integrate when the students do not need to be independent at using them. My 20% project helped me meet this standard because it gave me time to explore the technology tools and become familiar with them in order to be able to model how to use them to my students.
Over the summer, I will be doing some curriculum writing with my other first grade team members to integrate technology into our literacy units, helping me meet the fifth NETS*T standard. We will be creating integrated units for all of our LbD themes and writing up a unit plan in the same manner we did for our Integrated Unit assignment for our T&T class. My 20% project has given me the opportunity to explore ways in which I can integrate technology into the curriculum and gets me constantly thinking about different ways in which the tools can be used.
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