The Master of Arts in Education program has taught me how to use a variety of skills, strategies, and tools to improve my instruction so I can provide my students with a more effective and modern learning opportunity.  Shortly, I will be finishing this program and will be entering the next stage in my career.  As I progress further in my career, I have a few goals that I want to accomplish.  My goals are to integrate technology more effectively into my social studies curriculum, work on effective lesson design for this integration, and to become a facilitator of technology at my school.

 

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Using technology has always been an important part of my instruction and I have really enjoyed learning about how to implement technology into my lessons and activities as well as the variety of tools and programs I have been exposed to throughout the MAED program.  Because of this, I would like to continue to gain more experience on how to implement technology into my classroom through classes and/or workshops.  By doing this, I will be better prepared for the types of instruction that I want to give to my students.  One workshop that I plan on attending is a Google training seminar (EdTech Kickoff) that is put on by our county’s ISD every year.  I want to attend this training because our school is a Google school, and by becoming more skilled in a technology that my students are already familiar with, the more effective my instruction will be for my students.  Furthermore, I want to become better at implementing technology in my curriculum specifically.  This is because many students find social studies subjects to be boring and by learning how to use more technology more effectively, hopefully I can create a social studies curriculum that is more engaging for my students.

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My next goal, lesson design, is really an extension of my first goal of integrating technology in my instruction.  If I am going to use technology in my instruction, I need to be able to design lessons that effectively use the technology.  I plan on doing this by utilizing the resources that I have gained from this program or will gain in the future from workshops or classes, such as AP summer workshops, to design lessons for my courses.   From this point it will all be about practicing these lessons and getting authentic feedback from my students and/or colleagues.  When trying new practices, teaching is all about feedback, and by getting feedback from my students and colleagues on the lessons I will be implementing in my instruction will help me to further improve the design of my lessons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Currently, my school district is pushing for us to use technology in our classrooms, which is why I want to work on how to integrate technology into my instruction and improve the designs of my lessons.  However, due to this push to use technology as well as my position as the Social Studies department head at my school and the upcoming completion of the MAED program, it is a goal of mine to become a facilitator of technology at my school.  Like I stated in the design of lessons, I plan on using what I have learned in this program as well as at future workshops and share it with my colleagues.  Also, because I am the head of the department, I would like to work with my fellow social studies teachers to create a department plan so that we can all implement technology into our instruction in similar ways so we can create a more cohesive instructional plan.  Furthermore, I plan setting up my own professional development sessions at my school so that I can show my colleagues what I have learned and work with them so they can practice using the tools and strategies that I have learned.  I have already done this once with Screencast-o-Matic and it was very effective.

 

Learning how to implement technology more effectively into my instruction, improving the design of my lessons, and becoming a facilitator of technology in my school district are all future goals that I have to better myself as an educator.  Throughout my career I have worked hard to become a better teacher by trying new practices and believe that although some have failed, I have been successful.  I look forward to continuing of my career and accomplishing the goals that I have set for myself so that I can give my students to best education possible.