eme2040 Reflection

When I first signed up for eme2040, I thought we were going to be learning about the ins and outs of the programs that teachers use at school.  When I received the book, I was happy to see that it went over a multitude of technologies and websites.  I believe I brought a nice experienced background to the classroom and was able to help many of my classmates.  I would make plans to meet classmates before class and would help them on figuring out blogger, zunal, google docs and more.  I will admit that at times it became extremely frustrating when there were people who never got it.  I think I learned that I have a much higher patience for children than I do for adults.

I believe that Wikispaces is a highly useful tool for teachers and students.  However, I found the lack of communication to be daunting and disorganized.  Many of the group members did not participate in the discussions, or did not post their discussions in the right place.  The conversation also was not threaded so it was hard to tell who someone was talking to if the conversation got long.  I think it would have worked better if we were allowed to use other sources besides the website.  Often people would wait for days to check on the site, which would hold up all progress.  The result was not something that made me proud.  Not all the group members put a lot of effort into their pages, which made the website overall look disorganized. The wikispaces project just seemed like a flop to me because there was such a huge lack of communication.  People were editing other people’s work without saying anything, and it just did not jive really well.

I did enjoy creating other projects in eme2040.  I think my favorite was my genetics webquest that I posted on Zunal.  I got to be creative and followed the steps in creating an affective lesson plan that is engaging.  I even shared this with an old teacher of mine who I was doing an observation on.  She was very excited about my project, and she joked by saying I will probably take her job when she retires.

With my experience in group projects, there was good and bad aspects.  The collaborative lesson plan was interesting because we came up with something completely original all on our own.  It benefited the group to work as a team when it came to research because we were able to pull so many ideas from each other.  When it came to writing up the lesson plan though, I would have preferred to do that on my own.  I think as teachers we can all enjoy and appreciate other people’s ideas and research, but we always have a slight spin that we would put onto something in each lesson. 

One activity that I learned in class that I will use as a teacher is webquests.  WebQuests, according to Maloy in Transforming Learning with new Technologies, are online inquiries by students—designed and guided by teachers.  This tool allows teacher to inform students how to perform research in a semi-controlled environment, use this information ethically, and synthesis it into a report.  They can be used for individual work, or better yet as a group work.  Being that most workplaces require members to work as a team it is important that we teach our students the importance of teamwork.  I found the process of creating a webquest enjoyable and is something I would like to do with my students.

Another activity that I learned in class that I will use as a teacher is creating teacher websites/ blogs.  I hope to create a website that I will update weekly that will engage the parents and students.  It should have a resource of information for parents to find, and engaging links for my students.  I would prefer to have a website of my own as an elementary teacher, and maybe a collaborative website as a middle school teacher.  There is a multitude of places that I can create a website or blog such as Blogger, Wix, Weebly, Teacherweb and more.  A blog post by McCallum lists ten reasons why a teacher should have a website.  In summary, it helps meets the needs of your students, the parents, and even helps organize yourself as a teacher and makes self-reflection easier. 


Maloy, R.W.(2011). Teaching with Educational Websites and Other Online Resources. In Transforming Learning with new Technologies (pp.153-4). Boston, MA: Pearson

McCallum, R. (2010, September 2). Ten Reasons every Teacher Should want a Web Site. Retrieved December 2, 2012, from Clean Apple: http://www.cleanapple.com/?p=165