Personal Growth Plan

Technology plays a huge role in education today. In the past, educators primarily used direct instruction as a form of educating students. Today, there are so many options with integrating technology into the classroom.

Technology can be used now to directly teach the students. Teachers are able to create power point presentations to introduce specific subject areas and to even create games that students can play to reinforce what was taught and/or learned. Students are also able to take what was taught/learned to create presentations and flow charts of their own.

Bringing lap tops or PC’s into the classroom builds student’s desires to read and write more and use more creativity when doing so. Students are able to use basic office applications, such as Microsoft Word and Excel, to write just about anything; from taking notes, creating journal entries and stories, to creating graphs, charts, and spread sheets.

Technology in the classroom also plays a huge role in differentiated instruction and meeting the needs of students who have disabilities. Lessons can be adapted and designed to meet the individual needs of each student that is being taught.

I am hoping that, through this program, I am able to go above and beyond the basic computing skills that I know. I know that technology goes beyond just using basic office applications and the internet on the computer, but that is often forgotten. I want to be able to teach my students how to Skype, create blogs and post information to web sites so that their families and peers are able to view and respond to.

I am also hoping to gain different ways to incorporate the basic office applications into the classroom in ways that meet today’s educational standards and benchmarks. My students thoroughly enjoy completing various web quests online, but I would love to take web quests one step forward and have myself and/ or students create their own quests. By doing this, I am hoping to also gain and teach using multiple resources that are only a click away.

I would also like to incorporate the use of different types media in my classroom. Daily, I have students create movies using Windows Movie Maker (which are our morning announcements), but I am, again, looking for multiple ways and resources of creating digital media.