Week One Reflection

After reading through everyone's blog this week, I learned that we are all in different places in our experience with using technology.  We all integrate technology in different ways but are also all very willing to learn and adapt as the course evolves. 

A lot of us already teach and then reflect on our lesson/unit and think about ways we can improve it.  Essentially this is one aspect of classroom research that we have been doing all along.  I really like the quote from Melissa: "students learning needs are different and many teachers are falling short".  I agree with this very much.  Technology changes so quickly and it is hard for schools to keep up with the newest.  It is also very hard to find the time to learn about technology if the time is not provided by the school. 

I am looking forward to working with and reading the blogs of the other high school teachers in this course.  I hope that we can all be resources for each other.  I know that Alice is interested in introducing excel into her personal finance course and I have been thinking about ways to use excel as well in my personal finance course, so maybe we can collaborate. 

For my classroom research project, I would like to incorporate the learning management system that we use in Sitka called PowerSchool.  PowerSchool has the ability to create assessment, polls, and blogs, submit papers, and have class discussions, list helpful websites and more.  As a teacher, I can see the data behind the LMS, including how many times and for how long students log into the system. I could compare the first semester's login time and usage to the second semester (since I have almost all of the same kids) as one point of data.