Reflection: Final Blog Post

Upon reflection of my "Personal Theory of Learning", I found that not too much about my thinking had changed. In my theory, I talked about the importance of creating a classroom environment where the student is exposed to a variety of learning acitvities to practice a skill and as much of the target language as possible. It was important to me to create a classroom setting that mimicked the country we were studying as far as the amount of the target language spoken. I think I would add to my theory the importance of having the students make connections throughout these lessons. It is important to connect student to student, student to text, student to teacher, and student to world. This will make the material studied more relevant.

I would like to immediately implement some of the ideas that I came up with throughout the course to my instructional practice. For example, I would like to use VoiceThread as part of a culminating assessment in one of my units. This will enhance my students' learning because they will be working collaboratively on a VoiceThread of their own then by extension, commenting on others' threads to critique, or ask questions. I would also immediately implement Quia.com to provide immediate feedback to students when they are practicing a skill. Finally, I would like to implement blogging in my class to extend the lesson outside of the classroom. Students could ask questions or discuss ideas after the lesson and this will hopefully solidify the content for them.

As far as the long-term goals are concerned, I hope to keep searching for new technologies, and try to modify my existing lessons to be more student-centered and to include technology. I plan to accomplish the former by joining in teacher discussion boards on the internet and also collaborating with the technology department in my school to keep abreast of new technology that can be implemented in my lessons. I hope to accomplish the latter little by little. Perhaps each month, I will choose a lesson and try to modify it to include one of the tools learned in this course or that I have found on my own to make the lesson more engaging.