NETS-T3 Reflection & Investigation

T3b: Evaluate yourself according to the standards of NETS-T 3. Model Digital Age Work and Learning [b. Collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation]
Self-rated as: Basic

For this particular NETS standard, I rated myself as Basic because I do not have the experience of collaborating in order to support student success or innovation. I have collaborated in my own social life and education using digital technology, such as Doodle, Facebook, and Edmodo. I feel that many of the social networking sites are very similar and knowledge in one influences your ability to easily catch onto a new one.

Here is an example of a Doodle poll. It's helpful for scheduling because it tracks the most popular time for meetings and decisions can be made easier with it.

In Your Experience
Collaboration has been a fairly good chunk of my college career. That is something that I was not prepared for from my education. Mostly because every time I was required to participate in a group or partner project, I was the one who completed the majority of the work and ended up frustrated with my "collaborator/s". Unfortunately, that's because most of our educations did not prepare us to work collaboratively. In a collaborative effort, I try to do my part and make sure that a piece of quality work is completed. Outside of school, my collaborative efforts range from coordinating a wedding (on the day of) to organizing a garage sale to being involved in clubs through WSU. I cannot think of additional technology that I would have been able to put to appropriate use in my past collaborative efforts. It's hard to imagine how to change past situations using present technology. I believe that going into teaching, it will be important for me to understand what collaborative tools are available to use. Being in contact with my colleagues, parents of my students, and my students will be important and I know that technology will drive much of this contact. 

Section Exploration
For this section, I chose to explore some new collaborative technologies that I have not heard of before. I believe that when I am teaching, it will be important to give my students and their parents the ability to communicate with me, and at times, it will be necessary to gain information about these families anonymously in order to gain a better snapshot of the social forces at work on my students. It will also help me gain insight from my students about what is working or not working in my classroom without the risk of students feeling exposed in how they feel. I found this tool for creating a survey called SurveyMonkey (.com) and it lets you choose from several pre-made surveys or create your own. There are different levels of membership to the website and depending on what price you are willing to pay, it will let you have access to different features of survey creation. I found a pre-made survey that I believe is an example of something that may be helpful to use in a classroom someday. There are several available and I recommend taking a look at them. SurveyMonkey is definitely a site that I can see myself using in the future.

Here is the survey I found that solicits feedback from parents about what kind of learning support their children receive at home.

Reflection
I agree with what November says about education in the digital age. Technology is constantly changing and next year, everything we are learning will most likely be obsolete and replaced by the next new thing. In fact, two of the websites recommended in our NETS book are already gone. Since technology will undoubtedly be a much larger part of our student's lives than they ever were in our own, it is important that we not only understand how to navigate it ourselves, but that we know how to guide them through the everchanging technology frontier (there have been 8 different iPhones and 17 total versions of iPhone (different memory levels) since 2007 - that's more than 1 per year and 5 iPads in 3 years). That means that we have to keep up with it as it changes. It also means that most of the time the students will probably be lightyears ahead of us and be teaching us about our own classroom technology. I think that my attitude toward technology has changed since my first timeline post. I still don't want to embrace technology too much because I feel that while it can enhance a learning experience, it can also take away from social skills that are also important. I don't ever want my teaching to be overshadowed by technology. While I will embrace what is necessary, I do not want to lose the personal face to face socialization that is important in functioning as a human.