CJPTTF: Take-Away Big Ideas

From the beginning, the idea of this fellowship excited me. As someone who has grown up surrounded by technology and who is just delving into teaching, the intersection of the two was a point of difficulty. I lacked ideas of how to meld the two, but I was already optimistic of the benefits the combination could impart to the classroom. Having seen how integral technology was in the lives of my students, it was crucially important that I use it to attract their attention to class.

I have learned many varied things from this fellowship. On a class wide scope, learning how to manufacture quizzes with Google documents, how to make flash cards online with quizzlet, and how to make entrancing visuals with programs such as tagxedo and wordle will all be used weekly in my class. On a macro level, our in depth exploration of the uses of wikis has inspired me to, in my role as technology coordinator for the religious school, to create a wiki for our school. This will be extremely useful to connect to parents, keep track of kids' work, and to keep track of the multiple facets of the technology we use.

I intend to use all we've learned as both a springboard for further exploration, as well as to pass it on to my fellow educators and down to my students. I hope to encourage our school as a whole to take advantage of this opportunity to forge forward, and to avoid stagnation. I am most excited to see in what ways I can use what I learned to engage my students, and to relate better to them. Many of the ideas shared with us were new and fresh to me, and I can't wait to try to fit them into a lesson plan. These ideas include web quests, vokis, online games, and the various timeline generators.

The final, critical idea I took away from the fellowship came from my own experiences learning during its duration. I discovered that technology can be a useful tool, but cannot replace classic instruction. I was reminded of the dangers of overwhelming students. I hope to avoid that pitfall, and to apply all we have looked into as part of next year’s curriculum.