Final Blog Post

Wow! I cannot believe that this course is already over. I feel like have grown and learned so much throughout these past few weeks. There was so much content covered and self-growth as a teacher and student. One of my favorite things about this course was learning how to be a better student and teacher. The best teachers understand their student’s struggles, thought processes, and more. By participating in the different tasks like the daily creates, blogs, independent learning project, and more we can relate our experiences to our future students. Each post that I wrote there was great insight to the topic and just about every time I would relate the topic to my own personal life. I feel that people remember concepts or topics better if they also remember a story or personal experience with it.

I feel that all of my posts throughout the course have been pretty upbeat and positive. They reflect on the given topic, I expressed my personal feelings and opinions, talked about what I learned, and more. I remained respectful in my writing but also wrote how I felt. I have never been into blogging but I have always enjoyed writing and feel that I am good at it. With the weekly blog posts, whether about a specific topic or my independent learning project, I was able to have fun with it and make it my own. I also felt like my voice throughout all of the posts stayed the same and you could tell it was me the whole time. Throughout my blogs I felt like you could tell the topics that interested me more than the others and ones that I had strong opinions on. I was detailed about the different discussions and provided a lot of information. 

I honestly felt that all of the topics that I wrote about on my blog were very strong topics. They were interesting to me so that also made it easier to write them. I will definitely keep my blog, even if I do not write in it as much as I have been. A few topics that I really enjoyed writing and then revisiting were Teens and Social Media, Children and Technology, and Adolescents in the Digital Age. I found all of these topics very interesting and beneficial to me as a future educator. Technology has made a rise in the last decade and will continue to. As a teacher I need to be aware of all the technical advances and use them as tools in my teaching. Technology, social media, and the internet are all things that we cannot avoid so it is best that we learn how to utilize them in a positive way. Technology is also something that is only going to increase, not decrease. More than likely we will use technology even more in the future so we always need to stay caught up on the new tools.

Although there were some interesting blogs I wrote, there were also some that I know will be helpful to me in the future as a teacher. For example, the blog on utilizing TED talks is something I know I will refer back to in the future. TED talks are such a great resource but we also need to know how to use them correctly. Another one I know I will look back on regularly is the one on personal learning network. This is a strategy that I need to continue doing, working on, and growing throughout my whole career. I didn’t even know this was really a thing until the assignment. It is important and my blog really helps me understand it better and remember the information I need to know. Lastly, I really enjoyed learning about the importance of digital citizenship and digital activism. With as much technology as we use daily, these are two concepts that we need to be familiar with and teach our students. They are also both things that we need to model for our students.

As important as education is, it is essential that everyone, especially teachers, realize that teaching things like math, reading, writing, and other subjects is not the single most important thing. Many years of schooling is not for everybody, and oftentimes people learn the same thing outside of school that they could learn in school. We should encourage kids to choose a path that is right for them and not do something because they think that is what they should do or is expected of them. There are many people that feel they are not prepared for society like they want to be after they graduate high school or even college. It is also important to keep in mind that kids do a lot of learning on their own. The experiences they have teach them just as much as sitting them in a classroom. I am a firm believer that educators should be teaching students worldly things and not just academic things. Creating well-rounded students is going to also create healthier and happier individuals in the future. With that, we also need to find balance. We cannot just focus on academic learning like we cannot just focus on educating students on things they need to know in society.

There were so many different views, ideas, concepts, and more that I have learned throughout this course. I felt like I will be a better teacher because of this class. What I liked most about most of our topics was it showed us how to use different tools to be a good teacher and focused on us and the students rather than the content or curriculum. It also touched on a lot of topics that were outside of the normal content or curriculum. Even though we need to be promoting education we also need to be realistic and know that it is not for everyone. Although we need to have structure in the academic world, we also need to know how to give students freedom when learning. Kids remember things a lot more when they experience them first hand for themselves. I felt like I have grown in my thinking and my eyes have been opened to what else is important when teaching students.