Dell,+Katie












 * Final Exam**

Technology in the classroom is an increasingly important concept for teachers to master. It is not only how students learn, but it is also how they live. In five or six years from now I hope that I will be teaching in a school system that values technology and the benefits it offers. Technology will be a means to accommodate different learning styles in the classroom and outside the classroom and it will allow all students to grasp concepts they might normally struggle with. In the future I think that more courses will be offered online, but I also believe they will be more sophisticated. There will be more student teacher and student to student interaction.

Overall I think this course was a great introduction to using technology in the classroom. I think I expected this course to be more about using technology in a classroom or work setting, but it really had a strong focus on research through technology. By discussing research and how to research, I was reminded that often the field of education does not rely heavily enough on proven methods and practices. This leads to methods that become traditional, but are not always as effective as originally hoped. In researching my own topic of choice I believe that my technical writing skills continued to improve as did my understanding of both school climate and standardized testing. In the process I also learned a lot about plagiarism that had never really been explained to me before. I think this course did a good job of incorporating all the aspects of research writing, and the pace was slow enough and comprehensive enough so that I could take my time and really perfect my writing skills. The wiki concept also proved to be a very valuable one to this course. I had never used one before, but I think it is wonderful that group members can contribute to something at their own pace and several different drafts do not have to be emailed back and forth. Personally, I now think it is a technology that is seriously under-utilized. While I liked the course and its objectives, as a senior transfer student I also wish there had been a way for me to test out of this course. In my opinion, most students now have used technology in high school and have written research papers before. The course needs some sort of different component or objective that makes it more worthwhile as a general education requirement.