This is a final reflection of my experience with the MEDU-6710 Understanding the Impact of Technology on Education, Work, and Society course taught by Dr. Joseph Ferguson during the Summer 2025 quarter at Walden University. I have enjoyed many of the principles taught in this class and have learned about some tools that I would not have otherwise used in my curriculum. However, most of the tools I have learned about were through my own efforts of trying to find suitable tools to today’s available technology as substitutes for the ones recommended by the course that I primarily found to be outdated and no longer relevant if they were even still available. Below are the questions I was asked to reflect on in regards to this experience with my responses to each one.
In what ways have the media, resources, and activities of this course helped you to develop your own technology skills as a professional teacher?
Media and Resources
The books Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (2010) and From Master Teacher to Master Learner (2015) by Will Richardson along with a collection of videos from Walden University featuring Dr. David Thornburg (2015a-m) made up the primary literature for this course. We also heavily utilized the International Society for Technology in Education Standards for Students (2024b) and Standards for Educators (2024a) in our learning activities throughout the course. There were also resources as well, both scholarly and popular, that we referred to, some recent enough to be utilized in professional practice in the field of education technology and others as old as 2008 and all completely irrelevant to the technology this course was intended to teach.
The overall principles of these materials have helped me to question my practice, understand that it is no longer the role of the teacher to give the students information but to help them find it on their own and that it is the duty of an educator to prepare students for the college and career environment that awaits them outside the classroom which means also teaching them to be digitally literate enough to thrive in today’s heavily technology-reliant world. Richardson (2015) shared the timeless comment “The world has changed. Knowledge is everywhere. Teachers must become master learners instead of master knowers” (p. 5). It is not my job to know things or even help my students to know things, instead my job is to know how to find information and teach my students to do the same using the resources and tools they have access to every day.
Most of the tools and scenarios are painfully outdated, like when Richardson (2010) encourages teachers to rent DVDs from BlockBuster as a means to share timely content with their students (p.111). In expounding on the necessity of integrating modern technology into classroom instruction in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Richardson (2010) recommends several specific websites and platforms that may have been effective in 2010, but have since either become outdated or have ceased to exist altogether. This was most prominent in the chapter on wikis when he suggests the sites Wikispace.com and Wetpaint.com (pp.55-69). Unfortunately, these two websites are both out of commission and have been since 2014 (Wikimedia Foundation 2025 and 2024).
Activities
This course got me to do things that, as an education professional, I have never done before. I created an education blog and actually interacted with other blogs via the comments in lieu of just passively intaking their content, I used an X account to share my professional growth and pedagogical ideas, I used RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites, and I created a wiki-styled lesson on a wiki site that I later converted to a Google Document. I found the blogging and the wiki-site activities to be the most impactful of these activities along with the RSS feed which I was surprised by.
My blog, TechyTeacher42, has become an archive of my growth in becoming a more innovative and technology integrated educator. It is a tool that I am meant to use throughout the remainder of my time in the Master of Science in Education program at Walden University, but it is a skill that I intend to use throughout the remainder of my career as an education professional. I doubt that I will ever use my blog as a class site as the online learning management systems like Google Classroom and Schoology are much easier for students and other teachers and stakeholders to access while also preserving privacy and security policies of the school district. However, I may just keep a blog of my courses that I have taught and the content and activities I have used in those classes. This use of blogging will allow me to archive my past work for future use in the classroom, posting on an online portfolio, and sharing ideas with other educators.
Creating a wiki-based lesson was the apex of my experiences in this course. I used the site Confluence for my original lesson but converted it to a Google Doc so it can be shared and accessed without creating an account. This tool allows students to work collaboratively to find information rather than me providing it. The best part is that the type of collaboration involved is primarily nonverbal and can be asynchronous which makes accommodating the diverse needs of my students so simple.
I was surprised to find RSS feeds so useful. I subscribed to a few educational blogs and now, using the Google RSS Reader, I can click on the app in my pinned Chrome extensions and see if the blogs I follow have any updates. This has proved to be an efficient way to keep up with the fast-paced world of 21st-century pedagogy, especially when awaiting a response to a comment or question on a post I have already seen.
In what ways have you deepened your knowledge of the teaching and learning process with respect to integrating technology in the classroom? What might you do to apply that knowledge to how you facilitate the changing classroom of the 21st Century?
Because of this course, I have included the ISTE Standards for Students in my focus standards listed in my course syllabi for my 11th grade English classes (ISTE, 2024b). I have utilized technology in my instruction in the past, but it has primarily been just for myself while I have avoided requiring the students to do anything too difficult online. I have found that despite having nearly 24/7 access to modern technological resources, my students for the most part have been pitifully lacking in digital literacy.
What is, at least, one Web 2.0 and/or social media tool that you are open to trying in your classroom? What is a potential roadblock to its implementation and what is your plan to overcome it? How does your selected tool assist students with 21st Century skills and the ISTE Standards for Students? How does the tool support your meeting the ISTE Standards for Teachers?
There are so many Web 2.0 tools, or digital tools that rely on user-created collaborative content, that I look forward to eventually integrated into my classroom instruction, or at the very least gain some experience with. I have used Minecraft: Education Edition in my freshmen English classes in the past and have had my students frequently use Canva–I use Canva for class preparation and content creation and presentation nearly every day– and they are constantly utilizing Google Drive and Schoology. After having gained more experience with it, I would like to incorporate a form of wiki-based lesson material into my classes, but the tool I am most anxious to implement is AI.
I currently use ChatGPT for creating content like grammar practices and quiz questions, as well as for refining and utilizing rubrics and for providing instant feedback on student writing assignments so students have something to work with to begin their revisions while I am reading and providing my feedback on every other student’s work. I would like for students to be able to use AI themselves for receiving instant, rubric-based feedback on their writing, generating images to use in projects, finding sources for their research, and brainstorming ideas. Fischer (2025) also suggests having students program AI to roleplay as specific characters from a story or historical figure and have mock debates.
The greatest barrier preventing me from achieving integration of this innovative Web 2.0 tool is the attitude of the education system towards AI. Most teachers see AI as nothing more than a way to cheat and replace human creative and critical thinking. However, Song (2024) found in a study of sixth-graders and AI that the use of AI in the classroom has a strong potential, when properly integrated and regulated, to support student agency, encourage reflection, and mitigate anxiety by positioning AI as a peer-like assistant rather than a replacement teacher (p. 18). Furthermore, if teachers are anxious about students using AI unethically, the solution is not to block it–students will always find ways around blocked content–but instead to adopt it and teach them how to use it appropriately.
The use of AI in the classroom coincides perfectly with the ISTE Standards for Students standards 1.2 Digital Citizen and 1.5 Computational Thinker which involve students figuring out how to adopt new tools in an ethical and honest way (ISTE, 2024b). Not only does AI help students to meet the ISTE Standards for Students, but it also helps educators meet the ISTE Standards for Educators standards 2.1 Learner as they step out of their comfort zone to use this tool for themselves, 2.2 Leader as they pioneer this tool for their students, and 2.3 Citizen as they teacher their students how to use the tool ethically and honestly (ISTE, 2024a).
What are two long-term SMART goals (within 2 years) you will set for transforming your classroom environment in order to help students gain skills to be ready for tomorrow’s society and workplace? How do you plan to accomplish these goals?
The first SMART goal I have set to transform my classroom environment in order to help students gain skills to be ready for tomorrow’s society and workplace is to implement the use on an AI program in at least one of my classes to the extent in which it is utilized directly in a minimum of one quarter of classroom assignments by the end of the 2025/2026 school year. This will involve finding an AI that is specifically suited toward the goals and needs of education–I am currently looking at Magic School AI–and getting it approved by my district administrators. I went through the same process two years ago when I first implemented Minecraft Education: Edition and am thus familiar with the process and the people involved. Once I have an approved program, I will need to explore and experiment with it on my own and then slowly begin incorporating it into my classes.
Another SMART goal I am working on is to integrate the ISTE Standards for Students into my curriculum as though they were one of my content standards by the end of the 2025/2026 school year. I have already included seven of the standards in my syllabus for the 2025/2026 school year, the next step is to design content for the year that helps students to meet those standards.
As a result of your experience in your courses, consider how the topics and concepts covered might align with an issue that you might want to study?
As a result of my experience in this course and the professional experience I have had in my three years of being an education professional, I am intending to study the issues surrounding AI including the controversies and ethical dilemmas preventing it from being integrated into the P-12 classroom. In my studies, I hope to better understand why educators are so afraid of it and gather enough evidence to allow for it to be utilized rather than shunned by teachers.
References
Fischer, T. (2025, June 3). 5 engaging AI classroom activities to try with your students. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-engaging-ai-classroom-activities-try-your-students
International Society for Technology in Education. (2024a). ISTE standards: For educators. [Multimedia]. https://www.iste.org/standards/for-educators
International Society for Technology in Education. (2024b). ISTE standards: For students. [Multimedia]. https://iste.org/standards/students
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Corwin.
Richardson, W. (2015). From master teacher to master learner. Solution Tree Press.
Song, D., Nimante, D., & Baranova, S. (2024, November 24). Artificial intelligence for higher education: benefits and challenges for pre-service teachers. Frontiers in Education, 9 (1501819). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2024.1501819
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Walden University, LLC. (2015j). Today’s students [Video]. Walden University Canvas. https://waldenu.instructure.com
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Walden University, LLC. (2015m). Transforming the classroom with technology: Part 3 [Video]. Walden University Canvas. https://waldenu.instructure.com
Wikimedia Foundation. (2025, February 24). Wikispaces. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikispaces
Wikimedia Foundation. (2024, September 23). Wetpaint. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetpaint
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