Reflection on Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society

In the past couple of months I have been working on my latest class for my masters: Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society. The class was the best one I have taken through Walden University. The reason why I liked the class so much was that I actually learned things that I can easily apply to my classroom. For instance, I had to create a lesson plan where my students created a blog, wiki or podcast. I decided to make a wiki assignment for my Human Conflicts class. In the assignment a group of students have to create a wiki page with information on a conflict that they have chosen. Before the class I had never done anything with wikis but now I can use this new technology to assess my students and give them another creative way of expressing themselves. This class and this one assignment are not the end of my integration of technology into my classroom. I also learned through the class how important it is for us teachers to have the students collaborate with each other to create something digitally. In a previous post I shared about the Partnership for 21st Century Schools. The partnership and Walden have showed me that we need to make workers for the future of our nation and they need to know how to use technology and work with others. Therefore in the future I will continue to come up with new ways to teach my students and prepare them for the future.
Over the next two years I really want to embrace the ideas that I have just shared with you from my class. In the next two years I want to have two digital projects where the students have to work together to create the assignment for every class I teach. Each class I teach is 8 weeks long so ever month I want to challenge my students with something cool digitally. I look forward to developing these projects and seeing how the students respond. The second goal I have for my classroom is that I focus on teaching the students how to work together. Any teacher and student knows that group projects always have flaws. That is why I have stayed away from doing group projects in my classes. However I know what to teach the students how to work together more so they can succeed not only on projects in my class but on projects in the real world. I think in the next two years if I can accomplish these goals I can really help my students.