MEIT - Instructional Technology Program Completion

Looking back over the almost two years of blogging has been interesting. I didn’t know much about Web 2.0 when I started this degree program (actually, I had no idea there WAS a Web 2.0!). The beginning courses where great as they opened our eyes to the ins and outs of our computers and the tools that are available to us online. We learned about online data storage and took our machines apart... great stuff. We tackled several courses on implementing these tools in our classrooms (including the designing of courses as well as the type of leadership and buy-in necessary to move forward with a technologically new idea. We even took a statistics course… whew, made it through, again!

This has been a great course of study and has really showed me what the teaching profession could be heading towards. The idea of distance learning is not new (we had it in my backwoods little high school… so it can’t be all that novel!) but the use of the internet to create a more rich learning experience as well as to foster an environment where instantaneous collaboration and feedback are possible is pretty amazing.

As one of the few non-teachers in this cohort, it was great to be able to listen to the success and troubles of my classmates when it came time to implement some of the tools that we were discovering. There were the inevitable snags of funding, buy-in and technology capabilities (which was where my inability to fully implement anything in my current professional world would continue to be a source of minor frustration). But the instructors and my fellow classmates were very supportive as well as highly interested in hearing about the technology issues of the Military organization. This was a great course of study and I look forward to the time when I may be in a position to implement the learning technology tools that we all learned about.

Thank you all for helping me along throughout this program… it has been a blast!