Daily Reflection

Today we learned about the design thinking phase and had the opportunity to empathize, define and ideate with a partner. I think that the process was very interesting and was a great way to get ideas about my content area from another persons perspective. I did however struggle with providing feedback to my partner because I did not have a great breadth of knowledge about their content area. I am very excited to try some of the things that they have suggested for me.

While I have had experience both learning about and implementing the SAMR model I still needed a refresher on the content. What I found most confusing was the difference between modification and redefinition. I had a hard time differentiating between how doing a task redesign (modification) was significantly different than creating a new task that was previously inconceivable. In my mind a good redesign would do that. I had a good exposure to Schoology. First it is new and anything new always presents a learning curve. There were a lot of things to take in, however I think I would like to be a part of the pilot not simply for more exposure but it was hard for me to tell if I could really appreciate all of the features that the LMS provided with only minimal use.

I used to think that I needed to use a new technological application in each of my lesson plans in order to make them "interesting" . While I still believe that many of the applications we learned about can increase engagement and participation by students and in some instances make the learning process run smoothly. But I know think that to much technology can be overkill and sometimes rather than using Padlet we should encourage open class discussions and social engagement. I believe using applications sparingly and thoughtfully create a nice balance to engage students and yet reinforce group discussion and participation in assignments.

I think that todays class was great, I increased my knowledge base of technical tools. If I could point out an area that would have been more helpful it would simply be more time allotted to work on my lesson plan. I am still confused about all of the formulas in Google sheets. While I prided myself in being able to navigate most applications with ease I still struggle with Google sheets however I did learn about the "explore" button today which I do see my self using pretty frequently in the future.

As I look back on my previous reflections I think I was a little confused about what our end product would be. While I understood the daily concepts that were presented and was able to apply that information, one of the things I had the most difficult time with was how those smaller parts went to the lesson plans we would be working on as a whole. I feel like I could have put more into each lesson plan given more time. For example gamification sounds great but I barely had enough time to even get my mind around the content because it was presented so fast.
Looking forward to next year I am most looking forward into doing the activity in which I sort the students into groups based on the data provided from the Google Form assessment. I am also looking forward to how well my students perform/enjoy the augmented reality activity. I am nervous about any of the lessons that I worked on being a failure. Sometimes things seem so obvious and straight forward to us however student feedback does not match our enthusiasm.

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