Technology in the Classroom

Earlier in the year, we were given the option to put together workshops ourselves. We took a poll in the class and asked people what they wanted to have a workshop on. We decided to have the Teacher’s Union of Ireland come in and well as have one of our classmates do a workshop on Autism. The next most popular item was a workshop on Technology in the Classroom which had been proposed by myself and another classmate. When the opportunity came up to do it later in the year, I was initially reluctant and the other person had decided to not do it at all. I was reluctant for many reasons but the main one was how busy it was during that period and I feared it would be taking on too much. I eventually decided I would do it. I had been getting a lot of emails and whatsapp messages asking how to use various educational technologies and I figured it would be a good way of showing everyone things one time. I set about trying to design a workshop for teachers. I was extremely nervous about this in particular. These were my peers, they all had ideas about how teaching should be and here I was, walking into a room of them and opening my teaching style up to judgement by them. Due to lack of time, I decided on the relatively simple format for the class, that is, demonstrate and ask them to repeat what I just showed them. I decided it was important to show the experience from both teacher and student perspectives on each of the technologies. This meant a lot of switching between my laptop, the computer in the room and my phone. Thankfully the consoles in the education building make this easy enough, but it was still a lot of stress to constantly switch. I sent out a survey before the workshop which asked what people wanted to know and tried to cover as much of it as possible in the time I had. This time was unexpectedly cut short the day before the workshop and therefore I did not get a chance to get through as much as I was planning to.

The workshop overall went well and the feedback was good. As stated i didn’t get through as many technologies as I wanted to due to a lack of time. This disappointed some members of the class as they had wanted to learn about one of the things I didn’t have time to cover. I prepared some video tutorials prior to the workshop so that classmates could look back on some of the things that had been covered. I also created a padlet for them with helpful links. These things helped immensely. I could direct people to the padlet or the videos if I hadn’t covered something they were interested in. Not all the topics have a video but I do plan on adding to them over the Summer. Again, this was all due to the short preparation time in the middle of a very busy period. I plan on improving the resources I have for the class when I have some time. The padlet I created for them is here: https://padlet.com/ciara_e_byrne_1/hdfemaynooth2018.
Password: hdfe2018

I think had I had more time, I would have tried to come up with some more creative ways of teaching my classmates about the different technologies. Demonstration and then asking them to try it themselves, although effective, can get boring after a good amount of time. I think I would have created activities around the different technologies if there was more time. The class seemed to enjoy the workshop anyways and from the feedback and talking to them since, they got a lot out of it. The aim of the workshop was to improve the knowledge of the class around technology and I think that I achieved that.

The nerves about teaching my peers dissipated as the workshop went on. They were all kind and supportive and many of them came to tell me how grateful they were that I was willing to do this workshop. They are a fantastic bunch of people and I’m lucky that I got to spend some time teaching them.

What Class Wanted from Workshop.xlsx
Technology in the Classroom - Feedback (Responses).xlsx

Peer Learning and the Group keyboard_arrow_right