I envision technology playing a significant role in the management of my classroom as well as in the support of my content. To encourage a successful balance of technology, content and pedagogy in my classroom, I will focus on the ideals of the TPACK framework developed by Koehler and Mishra, which extends Shulman’s design of Pedagogical Content Knowledge by adding Technology as an additional area of knowledge. I see technology as a way of facilitating the same core content in a more efficient way. I have always had students keep a daily journal where they would record their thoughts about writing prompts or record ideas they had for future writing assignments. With this being a daily assignment it often made it difficult to collect, read, give feedback, and return all of the journals in one evening. By using technologies such as blogs student will be able to make daily posts, which both of us will have access to at all times. Students can receive feedback at all times and even invite classmates or family members to submit comments on their journals to increase the funds they can learn from. The blogs provide a more efficient way of communicating content to my students allowing me to better manage the feedback they receive and support them on a more independent basis.

Over the past year my personal technology plan has shifted significantly as more technology has become available to my classroom. Since becoming a member of the Technology Dream Team within our school, I have implemented technologies such podcasting, wikis, and movie production, which can be viewed on the Classroom page of my online portfolio. I believe that I have only been able to develop engaging uses of technology like these, because of the quality resources we have available to us at our school. For the coming year we are once again moving ahead in the age of technology, I will be piloting a one-to-one laptop program with my two teammates. I believe the flexibility of having a computer for every student will allow us to integrate additional technologies into our classrooms.

My goals for my classroom in the upcoming year are to using blogging as I mentioned about to open the communication between my students, their work, and their peers. I will also be using the flexibilities of technology to support my pedagogy of a problem-based classroom where my students have constant access to resources that they would have access to in future positions. My current goal is to start off small as I learn the power of the one-to-one situation. If there are too many new ideas coming at the students at once, it might result in a collapse of the TPACK framework and the students’ learning would be compromised. As with any philosophy this one is ever changing to align with what is best for the education of my students.