Now that it is all said and done…I’m going to tell you how I REALLY feel….haha.
When this class first started I had no idea how any professor could fill up an entire semester with technology. Ransom has proved me wrong. I have learned things I never even knew existed and I approached things that I have always avoided simply because I have had so much going on in my life that trying to learn something new would send me over the edge. My main example being pod casts. I have i-tunes and was given a Nano as soon as they hit the shelves back in the day…I was hip…now I’m outdated…and I’m 23…so, for all of you older students….it takes effort from everyone to stay up to date. I avoided pod casts on my i-tunes because I figured it was just some extra that I do not really need…now, because of this class, I have a tool I never knew I had for my future classroom.
There are some things that I am still nervous about, but, now have the tools to give to my students to make sure disaster doesn’t strike my classroom. It sounds stupid, I know, but my biggest “DUHH” moment came when Ransom said, “Give them the resources they need, educate them.” This blew my mind because I was so caught up with, “How am I going to catch this stuff? What do I do when I catch them? What if I over look something?” It never occurred to me to provide them with materials…this made me feel really dumb and unprepared. But, it also made me feel better about preparing my students. I feel that is the overall theme I gathered from this class for me…preparation.
When I say “preparation” I don’t just mean for a unit test, next class, or the state tests, but for life. Technology is unavoidable and is constatnly changing. The longer I avoid it the worse off I will be with my students. If I can take something they are passionate about and find a way to incorporated it into my lesson then I not only have their attention, but, I am teaching the content they need to know. Also, technology is all over the place. The more exposed my students are to it, the better off they will be after high school when they go to college or enter the work force. I do not want them to end up like me…not learning what blogging is until my final semester at Geneseo…with my peers staring at me like I lived under a rock. Rocks are bad…and I am happy that this class brought me out from under mine and made me more open to technology and working it into my classroom.
Kmerman9's Weblog 
The reality is that if you don’t “teach them” in the classroom, they will be using the technologies anyway… for their own personal learning. The big crime here is NOT incorporating new ways of learning, knowing, collaborating, sharing, creating,… in the classroom – the very things that they are comfortable with outside of the classroom… except that there will be no one to teach them proper, safe and ethical uses of these tools.
So, hats off to you for shifting your “rock” and being open to considering new possibilities for teaching and learning in your own classroom – whether you are truly comfortable yet or not. Discomfort will always precede comfort, so don’t let that frighten or dissuade you. You don’t need to be the immovable rock that so many teachers become. For, in the end, it is about excellence in teaching, not just about being a technology “geek” 🙂