Every once in a while I take some time to reflect upon the recent past
and I am always amazed at how much I have learned. For example, when I graduated
from college I realized how much knowledge about computer science I had gathered
in my four years. Or when I left my first job out of college and had a resume filled
with relevant activities. Even when my oldest son turned two I looked back on
the past two years and realized how much I had learned about raising children and
being a mother. The last two years I’ve also grown so much as a result of completing
my masters in educational technology.
Each time I start out on a journey like these
I think I know so much and then after a couple of years I look back and realize
that I hardly knew much at all. Like when I read every parenting book Barnes & Noble offered during my pregnancy but none of them prepared me for my son being sick and needing emergency surgery twice in his first two months of life. Or when I knew every type of looping algorithm for programming but needed to find the perfect one for my first application I was paid to build. I suspect the next couple of years for me will be
the same.
For the next year or two I will be teaching full time the undergraduate
educational technology courses at CCSU. I’ve spent much of the last year preparing
for this by auditing the courses, researching and completing my masters. As I said
before I’ve learned so much. However, I imagine that over the next year or two
I will grow so much more as a person, as a teacher and as a lover of technology.
I’ve prepared myself to teach the topics of the courses: iMovie, Microsoft
Word, Google Spreadsheets, Smartnotebook, blogging, WebQuests, concept-mapping,
Wikis, social networking, and podcasts. I’m now preparing for how I will teach
some new additions to the courses including Personal Learning Networks and iPads.
While I’d like to consider my knowledge of all of these areas above average I’m
not sure if I will ever be able to say in this world of rapidly advancing technology
if I am an expert. Because, after all, once you become an expert in something technological,
it is passé and there is a new technology to learn. That is OK, because life would
be boring otherwise. At least for me.
Despite that, in the next year I plan to strive to be an expert in all of
the topics I am teaching. Most particularly, I plan to become an “expert” in PLNs
and iPads. While I do subscribe to many email distributions and Facebook pages on
educational technology, I hope to really ramp up my network of resources in the
next year. I hope to seek out the best practices of the technologies I know and
to get familiar with the ones that are new. I hope to develop a list of people with
which to connect. In addition, while I don’t have an iPad I hope to learn more
about them for personal use, productivity as a teacher and for instruction. Furthermore, I spent
some time this spring getting to know the gradebook module of moodle and I hope
to continue my knowledge of that and expand it to include the new features of Moodle
2.2.
It’s been a very busy two years for me completing my masters and raising
my family. I hope once my coursework is done and my group project is complete I
can spend some time reading the pile of books that sits on my night stand that I’ve
collected over the last couple of years. Most of them are about educational technology
and there is one or two on personal growth. Maybe, I’ll even find time to read
a novel or two…on my new iPad.
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