Intro

Philosophy

I believe that education is still the key to keeping our country great and on the forefront of new developments and ideas. With that being said, as educators, our roles have evolved into that of being facilitators and directors rather than content experts. We need to try to reach as many students as possible, not with just facts and figures, but with application and problem solving skills, the desire to learn and the desire to become lifelong learners.

In my own educational experiences as an educator, I find myself having to periodically re-evaluate many facets of the process. Some examples would be methodologies, assessment practices and the accommodation of different learning styles….all things that coming out of college we really weren’t necessarily well prepared for.

As education and society have both changed, I have seen the many changes in education: some good, some not so good. The unifying theme though, is that we are all trying to better equip our students for life in a rapidly and ever changing world. My desire is to help students become citizens that embrace lifelong learning and help them become people that are able to apply and solve problems, not just regurgitate facts.

I’ve found that in the process of working on my master’s degree, that there are many more elements that need to be considered and that educators, scholars and researchers are hard at work to provide us with information and strategies in methodologies, assessment and evaluation that will help us be better prepared to equip our students better for life in the 21^st century.

I also believe that technology is at the forefront of our ability to help students, especially those that do not do well in the traditional classroom or with the traditional learning strategies. Technology has made it possible to enable students to participate in 1 to 1 learning strategies and to engage them in ways that were not available before. As educators, our biggest challenge will be how we can best implement the new technologies that are becoming available and how to even keep up with the fast changing world of technology.

I see myself becoming more of a facilitator in some of my classes where we try to utilize some of the newer technologies. I have always tried to be on the cutting edge of technology implementation, but time does not always allow for being able to present the information to the students as comprehensively as I would like. Therefore, I find myself learning shortcuts and tweaks from the students who are more involved in the day to day usage of the programs/hardware than I am. Thus, I give them the assignments and information needed to get started and they will embark on application and discovery themselves.

Much of education is devoted to meeting standards and doing well on tests, but I feel that education should be more than that. Administration and staff should focus attention on enabling the students to learn in the style that best suits them as well as making learning a process that the students will not dread. We need to also help the students participate in what and how they are learning. Technology has shown us that we can now have the tools to engage students so that they can enjoy and apply the items they have learned.

MSET has enabled me to take a closer look at some of the areas that I need to revise in my teaching. Those areas include proper assessment and evaluation as well as focusing more on more active learning approach to education. I have also learned through experience that as technology can make learning and delivery easier, it can also be unstable at times which can cause a slowdown, but the benefits far outweigh the negatives. I have also been shown that there are leaders out there willing to help and inspire other educators with the use of technology to make the educational learning experience an enjoyable and productive one. As I participated in the MSET program I focused on 3 major themes. Those were: Technology leadership, Instructional design and Technology integration.