Week Four Reflection

My e-portfolio for this class will be the third portfolio I’ve created—though the first one that hasn’t been paper-based. I created a portfolio for my student teaching experience when I was an undergrad, and then I created another during my second year of teaching as part of the certification requirements in Connecticut. While creating a portfolio can be time-consuming, and occasionally frustrating, I think it’s a valuable experience and is helpful for reflecting on your past practices and future goals.

Like I said, however, this is my first electronic portfolio, which will be interesting. I like the idea of an electronic portfolio because of the potential ease in adding to the portfolio, revising and updating materials, and expanding it to reflect future work. I am also working on the e-portfolio for my practicum as a school library media specialist, and it has been an excellent opportunity to reflect upon what I have learned and created over the past year, and also what I would like to do with those skills in the future. I like that it’s something I’ll be able to use professionally, access and update easily, and continue to use to reflect on my professional development.

I think this is one of those instances where adaptation of new technology really does change how something is done, and is demonstrably superior to the old way of doing things. A paper portfolio was a static document; an e-portfolio is dynamic. Of course, a paper portfolio was potentially dynamic, and an e-portfolio can become static, but the mechanism for making it a dynamic document is integral to its form.

As I work on the portfolio I’m learning a lot about how e-portfolios differ from paper-based portfolios, and getting used to using FrontPage, which is a program I haven’t used before. I’m glad we have the templates to use; I’m not sure I could do this from scratch in such a short period of time!

Week Three Reflection

WebQuests were just coming into fashion when I left teaching—well, they were probably in fashion before then, but I had just become aware of how fashionable they were. I didn’t explore them much—they were always on my “To Do” list of things to check out, but I never quite got around to it. So I’m excited to be exploring them now, as it because the great potential they have in educating students and helping them develop critical thinking skills became immediately obvious.

My initial conception of a WebQuest was that it was, essentially, an online treasure hunt—go here, find this answer, then go to the next place to find the next answer—an idea which, frankly, did not much interest me. But in reading more about WebQuests this week I see that my initial ideas were not at all accurate. I know one of the reasons I did not explore WebQuests much when I was teaching was because it seemed just like a doing the same old thing, just with a different format. Now that I’ve explored them a bit more, however, I see their great potential for doing all those things that I struggled to integrate into my teaching—critical thinking, independent learning, higher-order thinking skills. One thing that appeals to me in particular, and that I had been completely unaware of, was that WebQuests are usually performed collaboratively, not individually. My notion of a WebQuest was that students worked on their own computers discovering information—I love, however, that they are collaborative. The collaborative aspect of WebQuests only adds to their appeal for me.

I think WebQuests, when created and used thoughtfully and reflectively, have amazing potential in education. As with incorporating anything new, however, I think the biggest stumbling block will be helping teachers see that this is not an additional burden, but something that can really help them teach. As a Library Media Specialist I hope to be able to work with other teachers to find and implement WebQuests into their teaching.

Week Two Reflection

I think we often assume that because students have often grown up exposed to the Internet and using online technologies they are automatically comfortable with them and know how to use them. This is, obviously, not the case and instructing students in how to use online resources safely and effectively needs to be part of their education. This is not something they will necessarily be able to pick up on their own, nor is that the best way for them to do it. Just as we all needed to adapt to the online world, students will need instruction in how to make sense of everything they find online. We may call them “digital natives” but the landscape is often just as foreign to them as it is to us.

Given that the technological landscape is expanding at an exponential rate, I think it’s important to not just teach specific skills for specific resources, but also to teach general online etiquette and ethics. That’s one of the things that I liked most about the resources we were given this week—there was a lot of information about general behavior and theory, not just about how to use a specific technology. If students are equipped with a general idea of how to behave in an online environment they will be able to adapt those ethics to new technologies—and to their off-line lives!

One of the things I do worry about is using too many scare tactics to warn children and teens about predators online. Yes, it is a real danger—just as it is a real danger in the offline world. I worry that by being overprotective we may prevent students from learning how to protect themselves. I think there’s a crucial balance to be struck between letting children roam the Internet without limits, and keeping them so protected that they don’t learn how to prevent, recognize and avert dangers on their own.

The technology landscape is changing so quickly that it’s often difficult for the legal system to keep up. Given that that’s the case, I think it’s crucial for us to be thoughtful, reflective users of technology—just because something may, for the time being, technically be legal, that doesn’t make it right. Until the laws catch up with technology—if they ever do—I think it’s a good idea to keep the Golden Rule in mind when communicating and using resources online.

Even though it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit it, one of the things I learned in exploring this week’s resources was everything I’m doing wrong with creating passwords. While I wasn’t making some of the more obvious mistakes (i.e. using “password” as my password), my passwords could definitely be a little harder to crack. I’ve started changing my passwords using the tips I found through several of the websites from this week.

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Week One Reflection

I have used wikis, blogs and podcasts frequently in my academic and personal life (were it not for NPR’s five minute news summary podcast, I would have no idea what’s going on in the world), so it’s exciting and interesting to actually be creating them myself. Even though I know that these things are relatively easy—I have created a wiki in my Young Adult literature class using pbwiki.com—there was still a mental stumbling block in using them. While I am young enough to have used online technologies during my post-secondary academic career, I am old enough that I still distinctly remember being exposed to the Internet for the first time. It’s a little dizzying to think about how much our communication capabilities have expanded in just the past ten years. It’s also amazing to realize how much easier it has become for anybody to make use of these technologies.

There was not much new information in this week’s readings for me, as I have used wikis, blogs and podcasts before, and also read about them extensively in other classes. I am always interested in reading more ideas about how these applications can be used in education and was very interested in the article that mentioned wikiHow, a site with which I was only vaguely familiar. I think wikis are a great way for people to share their knowledge. Blogs present a great way for students to communicate and exchange ideas, and podcasts have great educational potential, especially for students with learning difficulties. I know that there is still some resistance to using these applications in schools, and there are some legitimate concerns, but I think the trend is moving inevitably towards using new and emerging communication technologies in classrooms.

One interesting thing I did learn from this week’s reading was a bit more about the system behind subscribing to podcasts. I’d never really distinguished between podcasts and just regular audio files available online, though the distinction is fairly obvious now. I’ve also used RSS feeds to subscribe to different blogs, so it was good to make the connection between these two different applications that I use; now I think of the podcasts I subscribe to as “audio blogs.”