Thing 30: Final Reflections & What’s Next?

Strangely, I learned how important it is for me to teach technology skills in general, not these skills specifically.  This year, with third- through sixth-grade classes, I taught the students to create their bibliography or citation list by copying and pasting.  There were lots of problems with just having the students log on because they do it so infrequently.  The labs usually have the computers on and set to the AIS or typing program that they are going to use.  You would have thought that I was a wizard when I taught the classes about CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V.  They were absolutely amazed!  It is such a simple thing and one that many schools can assume that their students already know.  They LOVED learning it and it will serve them well for years to come.  With the sixth graders, I tried to use GoogleDocs and GoogleSlides to give them a taste of the future.  They were excited, but the logging in was again a huge hurdle.  Having to enter "@schoharie.k12.ny.us" doesn't seem like such a big deal, but it really was.  I have a SMARTboard, but my computer doesn't look exactly like either the laptops or the Chromebooks, and that is a larger problem than you would expect.

After the SLO post-tests were done this year, I made new lessons for grades 1-3.  We used computer resources so that I could remind the students that they have access to these 24/7/365 from any device with web access.  The students loved it.  They were very engaged and they were using the skills that they had learned in the earlier classes to find and locate information.  I sent every one of them home with a reminder of how to access the resource they used (database or ebooks).  Hopefully some of the students will use the eResources over the summer.

I have been telling my colleagues about tools that I think that they could use.  I should spend time before school starts in the fall making a catalog of sorts of useful tools.  I really hope to create a Symbaloo for my DestinyQuest home page since my GoogleSite won't load there.

I admit that I didn't do a good job at expanding my Personal Learning Network or making new professional connections.  Perhaps there should be a specific thing next year to connect with another participant somehow.

Time management is always one of the biggest challenges.  I would love it if the "workshop" started earlier in the school year.  Personally, mid-November and December are a blur and I am recovering in January.  I would love to get more done earlier so that I could apply more to my classroom.  My other biggest challenge is that my right wrist was injured when I took a bad fall.  My sisters have been trying to type for my posts for me over the last few weeks.  I even tried out my phone's microphone feature to dictate one of my posts.  It was somewhat successful, but some of the words that they substituted for the words I used were incredible.  Still, a dictation tool is worth investigating in case of future injuries for me or my students.  

I didn't have trouble with any of the Things in particular.

This entire process emphasized the problems that my district has with technology.  Our technology is old  and we don't have much.  The students don't all have devices, nor do they have adequate web access.  

I like learning this way, but I wish that we could front-load the Things so that when we have time we could work instead of waiting for new things to come along.  I'm very glad for this opportunity and I hope that we will have the opportunity in the future because there are so few technology-related PD opportunities, in my district in particular.  So many are so expensive or they are held right after the traditional school day.  Schoharie is 30+ minutes from most of the region, so a class that starts right after school requires us to leave early!    I hope to get more people in my building involved if it is held next year.  I am also on the PD committee and hope to be a mentor-coordinator, so I should have a lot of opportunities to advertise the program.  Assuming the 100 PD hours for everyone is a done deal, I think the program will get much more popular.  I hope that SLS's will still let people who have already participated continue because we get so much out of it.

Are you ready for next year, Polly?!