About Me

Originally posted to Moodle Sunday Night_Copied and Pasted Tuesday...

A little late in getting to our first assignment but better late than never.  I am a high school math teacher that wants to continue his education and keep learning how to infuse technology into my classroom.  In addition, I want to get an idea of how the future of my profession might look in 5-10 years.  I already see some virtual learning options being implemented at the school I teach at now. 


I formerly taught in NYC (for 6 years) which is how I became involved with Teachers College but now live in RI, so I already am taking advantage of online learning to keep some continuity in my professional development.  The online course I took at TC was Computers and Problems Solving which basically focused on Web 2.0 tools.  What I liked about it was being exposed to some tools I could use in my classroom.  I experimented with google docs, wikis, Flickr, and Webspiration.  It was nice to gain some exposure, however, I sometimes find it a little frustrating to "experiment" with new tools that may or may not be commonly used or transferable to my profession (or may become out of fashion in a year or so).  Most of the tools we did use could be applicable to the high school community (my students) but I still find technology roadblocks in my school and a lack of time to efficiently implement the tools while meeting other curriculum demands.

I also found the "collaboration" in that course to be very poorly defined and ineffective.  There needs to be some very clear norms/expectations in any online learning environment.  I hope this course can help define some new paradigms that are useful for us and for a high school or other k-12 learning community.

I also took 2 online courses to learn Geometer's SketchPad.  An awesome technology tool for teaching Geometry.  This was more of a "product" course where I just had to independently complete assignments each week.  It was agressive but productive and I found the assignments really helped direct my learning and I got just enough feedback to focus my independent learning.

Looking forward to the course.


Gus Steppen