It feels like I just started CEP 810 yesterday. Sadly, it was 7 weeks ago which means my time in this class is at an end. Over the past seven weeks, I have learned many things from CEP 810.

Thanks to How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000) I was able to pick all sorts of new ideas. As a teacher, I find it hard to surrender control of my classroom. Student centered learning has always sounded great, but I have never been able to fully put it into practice. Part of this is fear, and another was learning how to design the lesson plans accordingly. After reading the first three chapters, I began to understand how to design student centered lessons.

I continued to think about this as I designed my 21st century lesson plan. Instead of just building objects in Minecraft and showing them off, I decided to allow my students to do so. It gives them an opportunity to play and learn by doing. The money to pay for Minecraft has always been available, I have just struggled to find appropriate lesson plans. With the knowledge from Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, I was able to design a plan and I feel much better about designing more ideas and lessons using these methods.

The TPACK activity confirmed what I’ve always believed. Technology is only as good as your lesson. If you just use technology for the sake of technology, you will not successfully teach. Instead, technology must be implemented in the classroom in a way that fits the curriculum and the teaching style.

The Network Learning Project showed me that it was possible to reach out to the internet for new skills. For that, I learned how to repair a Nintendo. I acquired this skill by doing. Instead of hiring someone to do it for me, I did it myself. It proves that learning by doing is a powerful tool.

I still have questions about how to implement technology with my teaching style. As I continue on through the MAET program I expect to learn some of these answers. CEP 810 was a great starting point on my journey to become a 21st century teacher.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.