Strengths and Weaknesses

After reviewing the UNI and NETS I feel like I have some great strengths but there are definitely other areas that I need to become stronger in. I feel like a great strength of mine is that I know how to do a little bit of everything and enough to actually be able to function as a teacher most of the time. Going over all the standards I think my best strength is that I can use many different software in multiple ways for meaningful educational use. I know how to use word processors, data processors and spreadsheets, I know how to help students create many different projects. I also know how to find and use many free software programs to aid students in learning that will facilitate core curriculum concepts even more than without technology. I feel like I am on the right track to being a technology involved educator that can keep up with my students world because I have been in this class. I also have a husband that stays up on technology all the time and really helps me be on top of the technology world that would be available to me at no cost and useful for my students. 

I feel my weaknesses are in creating my own programs using technology I am not familiar with to help students. I found that during my field experience I was in a classroom with a smart board and I really wanted to create an activity for my students to review the material we had learned in the unit and I found myself struggling a lot. I was surprised that I had a hard time because usually I pick up on things fairly quickly, but after about an hour of playing around on the program and getting no where I knew that I needed help in getting more familiar with smart board programs.  My goal would be to be able to find materials in aiding me to use new technologies that I may not be familiar with so I can utilize them to the best of my ability. I found this tutorial to help me learn about smart boards and I also found this tutorial to help me with the activities part of the software so I can create my own learning activities. These tutorials will help me in my goal because they can help me become more familiar with technology that is foreign to me so that I can use it to the best of my abilities.

Another goal for me would be to become even more familiar with ways I can use technology to assess student learning. Because I grew up in a paper/pencil testing world I don't think of technology when it comes to assessing my students. I know that technology can help me assess but I really have no idea how and I think it would be very useful to use technology if it can help me assess better than I am. I think assessing is one of the hardest things to do so any helps would be nice. One thing I never thought about was using electronic portfolios for assessment by letting students create their own projects and ways of presenting what they have really learned. There was so much information out there but a great website I found to help me get familiar and started can be found here. I really think this website can help me in my goal because it has so much great information and can link me to more resources for using digital portfolios in my future classroom.