Edu Tech Self-Assessment 7/7

 Anything Else

1. Please think about any other skills or dispositions (such as self-managing) that you consider essential to this work and add them to your self-assessment.

            I’m not sure if there are any other skills that I can think of as essential to this work. What I mean is that I know there are other skills, I just can’t think of any because my experience thus far with educational technology/technology in relation to education has been limited.

            As for dispositions, I think the following characteristics are extremely important, if not essential, to this work:

• A willingness to learn
• Honestly, this is an essential characteristics for a teacher in any situation because I think that teaching, like writing, can never become an automated process in your brain, it always takes a lot of thought, consideration, and mental energy if you want to do it well. If you aren’t willing to at least try new pedagogy or, in this case, technology, you’re doing your students a disservice.
• I'm very willing to learn and, in fact, I think learning new things is fun (feel free to laugh, I know I’m in the minority).
• Passion (for teaching if not for educational technology per se)
• Given that teaching does take a lot of energy and thought, how well you do it often coincides with how much you care. If you have enough passion about teaching, you’ll want to better yourself as a teacher by learning how to utilize new tools, such as technology, regardless of your thoughts/opinions on said tech.
• I have a lot of passion about giving all students the best possible experience in the classroom because we all have different learning styles, intelligences (as in Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences), socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, etc. and those differences should be celebrated. Learning more about tools I can utilize in my classroom is one way to do that.
• Patience
• Technology can be frustrating even if you know how to use it let alone when you’re just figuring it all out, which makes patience key.
• While I certainly can get frustrated, I like to think that I have a decent amount of patience—although I suppose I might not be best judge of that huh?
• Perseverance
• As implied in earlier bullets, learning new skills, especially in technology, often requires a trial and error framework and when hours of work end up telling you more about what not to do than what to do it can be easy to give up. The key is to keep going anyway.   
• I always give my all when I’m learning something new, even if I hit roadblocks. For instance, when I was in third grade, I really struggled with math, but I was determined to keep trying. I stayed in after school help everyday until I was comfortable with my (significantly better) math skills. 

One Last Note: Aaaand that’s a wrap folks! Thank you for all the reading (or skimming) you just did. Feel free to comment any questions and/or remarks. 😊