Reflections on Technology

What is a voicethread? What is an inspiration floor plan? How do I create any of this? And how does any of this pertain to me becoming a teacher? These are a few of the first thoughts that popped into my head the first day of my Utilization of Instructional Technology for Educators Class. After my initial thoughts of the class, as a student, I found myself becoming overwhelmed at the realization of all the technology available to help assist the educator, and the realization of how little I actually knew in the technological world. Throughout the first month of class, and with the help of my instructor, my mind has been opened to new ideas and programs available for me to utilize in my classroom as a special educator. The first assignment given was to complete a classroom floor plan with a program called Inspiration from Microsoft. I had never heard of this program before and was a little intimidated after seeing the basic requirements for the assignment along with not knowing how to navigate the program instructed to use. After Mrs. Nunes-Bufford went over the assignment and showed the class a few examples of how to use the toolbar within Inspiration, a light bulb turned on in my head. I thought to myself, “How cool is this!” This program is a tool any student and any teacher could use in the classroom. This reminds me of how teaching really helps you learn. This program could be used to construct diagrams, review games, or even allow the students to help with these different ideas.
After playing around with Inspiration, I realized that this program was a lot like Paint except more advanced. Realizing this made the program easier to navigate. Inspiration allows you to make different shapes with different colors and use pictures to place in the screen you are using at that time to construct ideas such as a classroom floor plan, review sheets, review games, along with anything else a teacher can come up with. For example: Inspiration allows you to make word boxes. The cool thing though is you can link boxes together and a line connecting box A to box B appears on the screen. This means that if you are doing a review a teacher can place different questions in different boxes followed by linking an empty box to the question and print this out and voila! The teacher has a review sheet made to copy and pass out to the students. Reflecting on this wonderful program Microsoft created, it is amazing all the ways I will be able to utilize this program in my classroom. Special Education teachers use a lot of visuals when teaching the class. This program will allow for a quick and efficient way to place words and pictures on a page to help aid the student all while enjoying creating it with this easy to use program by Microsoft.
The next assignment the class was instructed to complete was a voicethread. First we had to learn what a voicethread was and the best way to do that is take a tutorial of it. I was excited when I found out that a voicethread is not a program created by Microsoft but a site online created by a man. This site has a tutorial you can follow explaining exactly what a voicethread is and how to use it. Without looking on the website, the program can be best described as an instructional interactive learning tool. The interactive part of the website allows for anyone in the world to comment on a voicethread and essentially these comments could be questions. Through the assignment, I learned that a voicethread can be very helpful to students when learning difficult content as a part of the required curriculum. With the site being an interactive instructional learning tool teachers can use to upload PowerPoint’s for students, students get more involved with the learning process making learning fun! This website created will be very useful for me as a special educator. I will be able to upload PowerPoint’s to voicethread.com, record my voice to them, and inform the parents of the different lessons I have created to help the parent help the child at home! This is a fundamental part of being a special educator, working together with the parents to help the child with special needs to help themselves. This interactive program allows for interaction with peers and aims at a goal of independent learning.
Reflecting on the first day of class, I remember having all these questions as to how and why any of this matters to me becoming a teacher. I understand now, what the meaning of this class is and how big an impact technology is on educators and future educators. The utilization of these different programs as a teacher makes learning fun, easy, and sure to help with the retention of knowledge. In the future, there is sure to be more programs created to help me with educating my students and it is my responsibility as an educator to continue learning about these programs rather than be intimidated by them. They are all actually a lot of fun and really simple to use in comparison to the vast amount of knowledge my students will gain from me simply by utilizing technology in my classroom.