Give Me More
By: Stacy DeWeerd
As soon as I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree from Grand Valley State University in December of 2006, I vividly remember wondering what the next few years would bring me as a newly certified teacher. I could only hope that I could get a job, thrive in that job, and continue to learn and grow as a professional in the years to come. After finishing my first year of teaching in the Spring of 2009, I knew that I was about to begin that new journey with the start of my graduate level courses.
When I decided that I wanted to pursue the Educational Technology program in September of 2011 after completing the Certificate courses, my goals were to improve student achievement and student motivation through the use of creative and innovative technologies. As I worked countless hours on my graduate work, and countless other hours improving my classroom instruction through a mobile one to one learning pilot, I felt like I was making a lot of progress in the area of implementation, but only smaller gains in my goals of student achievement and motivation. Reflecting upon this, I came to one conclusion. I need more. I need more instructional and technology support. I need more time. I need more applications. I need more bandwidth! I need more uninterrupted time with my family because Twitter, Blogger, Weebly, MEAP, iOS, Android, CCSS, etc are taking up every roaming thought in my brain with new ideas to implement and explore. Although I continue to strive toward the goals of student achievement (I have loved using Socrative this year to pre-assess students to drive my instruction) and student motivation (real-time comments in shared Google Drive documents are way cool for kids), I feel that my goals are beginning to shift from goals for my own teaching in my own classroom, to goals of sharing (and caring!) with other professionals in my personal learning network.
So, as I am drawing to close on another chapter of my professional career, I would like to end with the goal of “give me more”. Give me more people to share what I know and love about technology with. Give me more time to experiment, explore, fail, and succeed with technology. Finally, give me more opportunities to continue learning about an ever growing, ever changing field that I have developed such a passion for, that I never would have expected. I can’t wait to see where the next road will take me!