Reflections of my Learning Journey

The last 24 weeks have been an interesting journey for me. Due to personal circumstances I struggled to get to this point. But I am here!!! Thanks to the support of my family, colleagues, other teachers on this course and my tutors at Mindlab.

So what I have I gain in the last 24 weeks? I have learnt that there is a lot of new technologies out there that can be used in the classroom. I at times I feel that I am siting behind the eight ball in this area as I took nearly 2 yrs out of the class and had a break from teaching full time. So now for me its about introducing technologies (either programmes or hard ware) into my class that I belief will support my students learning.

During the last few weeks I feel that I have worked at developing my skills to share my ideas, learning and contributing. During my time at my Saturday morning classes I shared ideas, took part in class discussions. When I went back to school I shared with some of my colleagues aspects of the course that I felt they would like to hear about.  I shared ideas on how to use Aurasmas. The Blendspace website that I plan to use more this year in my planning.

I have also enjoyed – once I understood what I had to do- writing the Literacy review. I will admit that I freaked out thinking how am I going to be able to write 2000-3000 word review but I got there. While I was researching for it, some of the reading that I used or that I read but didn’t refer to started to make me think more my practice and how I worked with my students. These readings made me question did I really understand what my Maori students and their families brought with them into the classroom.

This course has made me re think how I am doing things and why I am doing it. Its making me question the pedagogy behind why we are using the technologies in our school and are we using these technologies for the right reasons. I think sometimes schools rush into using the latest technologies without thinking about pedagogy and how well will they fit their school.