¶ … Concrete Experience
Initially, I wanted to take this Technology in the Classroom class to broaden my own level of general edification, as well as to assist me with my own pedagogical endeavors in the classroom (I teach a computer class at an inner city high school). This class was facilitated in a distance learning environment which helped to reinforce many of the principles and generalizations I learned regarding the usage of technology in the classroom. One of the areas of focus of this class was communications, networks and the internet, and there was a great deal of material covered in this course that was explicitly related to utilizing the internet and various computer networks to communicate. Moreover, there were instructions and guidelines for the most efficient and effective means of communicating utilizing this medium, which is highly prevalent in the digital world today. One of the most vital parts of the learning experience that related to this particular subtopic was the forum for discussion that was utilized during and following the completion of the majority of the class's assignments.
Reflections
Now that the class is finished, I realized that I learned a lot about communication via the internet. There are a number of subtleties to such communication within a physical environment that are reflected in the virtual environment as well. For instance, tone, nuance, sarcasm, and virtually any other aspect of verbal communication can be expressed through writing via a delicate manipulation of capital and lower case letters, italics, bold characters, etc. Additionally, I found that there is a greater valuation for and necessity involved with communicating in a way that is grammatically correct and properly punctuated, which can convey certain intangible assets such as respect and care. There were certain course objectives that helped me to learn about this process.
Generalizations,...
The concept of digital citizenship is something which I had not fully conceived of previously -- certainly not in those terms. However, I was also able to learn a number of important safety precautions related to maintaining the health of my computer and my network -- such as denoting various types of credibility associated with web sites, distinguishing between .coms, .orgs, .nets, and .govs, as well as the proper etiquette for communicating with others and identifying behavior that is and is not appropriate. Moreover, I was able to learn these techniques in a didactic fashion that has a number of applications to my teaching, especially as they relate to social media and online presence in general.
Testing and Application
One of the most advantageous aspects of my taking this course is the fact that I can readily apply its principles to the computer class that I have been teaching. One of the chief was that I was able to test many of the concepts that I learned in this class relating to communications, networks and the internet was by having my students get their own class-mandated social media profiles. Doing so gave me an opportunity to impart much of the wisdom I had learned regarding how toe effectively utilize social media in a professional environment, as well as a viable medium for monitoring their progress and seeing how well they were actually able to implement those principles. Their communication had to adhere to the guidelines that I learned via the class, and they were tasked with finding summer programs to participate in and leveraging their social media profiles during the application process.
Description of Concrete Experience
Through the aforementioned computer class,…
