Over the course of the past two years I have grown exponentially. The paths that I began walking down, graduate school and my new position at an innovative school, have intertwined, connected, and enhanced each of the experiences. While entering the program I already felt a great deal of confidence in my technology skills and background I still had so much more room to grow. I have worked to bridge what I am experimenting with and learning in the program with what I am seeing in my day to day work with learners. By staying rooted in practice and playing with the ideas as I went I feel that I was able to experience significant growth and develop new background and experience that will help me moving forward.
Throughout this journey I have continued to question how the world of educational technology fits with what I believe about teaching and learning. This is still something I feel is unresolved entirely for me but has developed more as I made my way through the program. I find myself frustrated with the world of educational technology often times as there seems to be spats of the "latest and greatest" thing and solving problems by sticking more technology in front of it rather than digging in deeper to the problem and examining the heart of it. Education requires change, and not just the type of change you see when you walk in to a school and see the newest technology being "implemented", but real change. The kind of change that comes from peeling back the layers that have created the industrial models of schooling that seem to still exist today and think deeply about teaching and learning. I struggled with this as I felt that my beliefs were contradictory of the the very thing that I was studying. However, more and more I see that I am simply leaving this program with new knowledge and experience and am simply unsatisfied and left wanting more. I still have the insatiable desire to explore and understand the world of education and be a part of the change.