My Experience Over the Course of Time

I have learned some things about effective teaching strategies when integrating technology into my teaching. One is showing patience on my part, and another is that technology is not a fix all for education. At times the Internet does not play fair. meaning that there are many glitches to the effective teaching strategies due to Internet speed, access and availability. I attempted many excellent web strategies integrating technology into the plan, only to discover I had no access to the Internet at the time I needed it. As a result, I went to plan B, non-web based until I had access. An example of non-web based was the PowerPoint interactive presentation. The presentation could be accessed over the Internet if posted to my website or it could be standalone, saved to a classroom’s computer hard drive where the students would have access to the presentation.
When I thought about integrating web-based technologies into the Arts, it was at first something I felt would be extremely time-consuming and uncomfortable. As an Art teacher I want my students to create works of Art, not spend their time on a computer doing research or whatever the other teachers are having them do. It doesn’t seem to fit what I do and what I need to teach my students. However, there is the history and cultural aspect of Art they can learn on their own, self-paced, using the Internet to access the information. This would and should free up more time in the classroom for more of the creation of Art. I see it as something students can do at home or in their study skills/advisory class.
My personal goals always have been to keep up with technology and transfer that knowledge to my students. I enjoyed creating the WebQuest. The Website and the PowerPoint presentations were very exciting. I look back and want to recreate them because I thought of perhaps a better way to construct them and to include other things.
One of my short term goals is to keep up with all of the online learning information I have gained over the course of this class. Another is to complete the pages of my Website that I was not able to finish and add more. Also, I would create more WebQuests and more PowerPoint presentations that students can do on their own. My long term goal is to complete the Masters in Educational Technology through the University of Michigan. My short term goal is to complete the paperwork to accomplish my long term goal. That might seem like a minor item, but ordering transcripts and doing all of the paper work is strenuous and only a means to an end. This is not something I really want to be doing, but I know I must.