Goal Reflection

My goals on Monday were to gain new tools to use with my students and to continue integrating technology in my classroom. These goals are definitely still useful to me as the learning in this area is seemingly endless.

It's Thursday afternoon and my head feels ready to burst. Not in a painful way (yet), but I do feel that I have gained a lot of information in the past 4 days and that information has taken on a life of its own inside my head like a plant spreading its roots through the soil. I know that as children our brains trim down unused cells so that if you stop playing the piano, or speaking French, to a certain extent your brain will cease to use those synapses and dendrites.

In the past four days I feel like I have grown new brain cells (yes, yes I know biologically improbable) and I hope to continue using these skills so that I will deepen and enrich my understanding of how to use these tools in my classroom and in my civilian life.

One of my goals for this next school year will be to make one last concerted effort to get my district to change their filtering system to make it less restrictive. Of the many amazing tools we have learned about, very few will be available to me with our current filter. This makes me incredibly sad.

My top three tools that I'm excited about using with my students (assuming a world with no filter) are blogs, RSS feeds, and google docs and all its fabulous permutations.