My Final Post - How Far I Have Come!

I have recognized three stages of growth when I reflect back on this learning process. I recognized beginning, developing, and integration. I started with beginning ideas and concepts that I gleaned from reading about a technology. Then I utilized a technology and had growth in my ability to use the technology. Lastly, I attained integration. I believe integration was reached on the final Student PBL Proposal Project. It all came together and felt natural to use PBL and technology. I felt I effectively picked the technology tools to be used for the learning goals. I feel my arsenal of tools and teaching methods is filling up. The stages of learning happened seamlessly with ease. I feel I had authentic, deep, personal learning.

So, where do we go from here? What is the next step in this learning process? Continued development from sharing with other peers. This can be done with other educators that have curricular foundations in technology and PBL. Blogs, Wikis, podcasts, among other Web 2.0 tools make the possibilities limitless! I look forward to the day we will look back on today's traditional methods of education and wonder why it took so long to integrate technology.

I am currently reading the book, The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools From the Ground Up, by Kieran Egan. I believe it is helping me to be able to reflect objectively on our current schools and pull myself out of my reality with our education system. I have filled the pages with highlights. The ideas are opening my eyes. I found it on the blog of an instructional technology professor from the University of Utah.

Amazon's description "This engaging book presents a frontal attack on current forms of schooling and a radical rethinking of the whole education process. Kieran Egan, a prize-winning scholar and innovative thinker, does not rail against teachers, administrators, or politicians for the failures of the school. Instead he argues that education today is built on a set of mutually exclusive goals that are destined to defeat our best efforts. Egan explores the three big ideas and aims of education—academic, social, and developmental growth—and exposes their flaws and fundamental incompatibility. He then proposes and describes a process called Imaginative Education that would dramatically change teaching and curriculum while delivering the skills and understanding that we all want our children to acquire. His speculative narrative of education from 2010 to 2060—executed with wit and verve—shows how we might very well get there from here."

Buy the book at Amazon