Running Head: PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 1

Personal Technology SWOT Analysis, Goals, and Plan

Nancy Curran

University of West Georgia

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 2

Personal Technology SWOT Analysis, Goals, and Plan

I am currently employed as a teacher at Harrison High School in the Cobb County School

District. I primarily teach Honors and Advanced Placement Biology with my primary job

responsibilities to teach the standards outlined by the state of Georgia for biology and also the

technology standards laid out by the International Society for Technology Education (ISTE).

Strengths

My greatest strength is my willingness to try new experiences in my career. For the past

ten years I have taught Biology and each year I have tried to improve upon the previous in some

capacity by trying a new teaching approach or bit of technology that can help to make my

classroom more engaging. I enjoy the challenge of trying something new in order to help myself

grow as an educator and to better teach my students a difficult subject matter that can sometimes

be difficult to relate to. Having grown up in the technology age I feel that I am more willing than

most teachers to try a new technology to see if it works for me. I truly see the benefits of using

technology in my classroom to engage students but also to make my life a little easier. The more

seamless a technology fits into my classroom the more time I can spend working on creating

engaging lessons for my students.

Another strength of mine is my educational experience. My Bachelors degree is in

Science Education and has provided me with a great foundation in content. My Masters degree

Instructional Technology and has contributed to my foundational understanding of how to

effectively use technology in my classroom. My education experiences have taught me the

importance of using technology to enhance the content in my classroom so that my students are

not focusing on the technology but rather the learning experience. Specifically the learning

experiences in my Masters program gave me a foundation in educational software such as

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 3

Promethean, Smart, Microsoft Office, and website design. In the future I hope to be able to share

this knowledge with other teachers in the hopes that they will be able to incorporate technology

into their own classrooms.

Weaknesses

I would have to say that my greatest weakness with regard to technology is my difficulty

in communicating the benefits of technology in the classroom to other teachers. Because

technology has always come so easily to me I sometimes find it difficult to train teachers how to

use technology because there are some tasks that I assume to be basic knowledge when that is

not the case for all teachers. When doing technology trainings in the past I have found it difficult

to slow down my speech and gradually walk teachers through the use of the hardware or

software. In a survey completed after one of my trainings a couple of teachers mentioned that I

spoke too quickly and that I needed to slow down my approach. I do not want teachers to feel as

though they are being left behind during a training and I want to make sure that all teachers feel

as though they are being supported all throughout the implementation of the technology.

Opportunities

Thankfully there will be multiple opportunities for me to improve upon my weaknesses.

My administration has been very supportive in offering new opportunities to learn new types of

technology and they have consistently encouraged me to try new things in my classroom to

further support my students growth in both biology and technology. Already this school year I

have been offered the chance to attend two different professional development trainings that

could help to further my understandings of technology use in my classroom, specifically related

to Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Im hoping to be able to parlay

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 4

that into even more trainings that may illustrate new ways to create a student-centered learning

environment in my classroom.

I also hope to be able to utilize the information obtained while obtaining my Specialist

degree in Instructional Technology. During the program I hope to learn new ways to use

technology in my classroom while also learning new ways to convey technology to the other

teachers in my school. I would like to take the opportunities that my program offers to learn how

to become a better technology coach at my school in order to help other teachers use technology

in their own classrooms so that they can create a student-centered learning environment through

the use of meaningful technology use.

Threats

A threat to my use of technology would be lack of time. With an ever-increasing work

load of students and prep work it became difficult to look for new technologies, familiarize

myself with them and take the time to appropriately implement them in my classroom. My

student course load increased over the years to a total of thirty-seven students in each of my class

periods. With that many students in my classes it was difficult to manage the grading and

classroom management required to effectively teach. During those semesters with increased

students I found that I would not take the time to seek new strategies for my students and simply

rested on prior strategies that had proven to be effective. Because I do not want my teaching

strategies to remain stagnant I feel that too many students, along with too many course preps,

made it difficult to implement technology.

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 5

Personal Technology Goals for the Coming Year

Each school year I try to implement at least one new technology into my classroom to

gauge its effectiveness for my students. Over the next year my goal is to work to implement the

use of Schoology in my classroom. Previously I have used Edmodo as my learning management

system and I found that there were certain limitations to the software that made it difficult for me

to organize my classroom and I also found that they types of assessment tools were lacking. For

those reasons I have decided that this school year I will implement Schoology into my classroom

management in the hopes that it will help to alleviate those issues. I am currently in the process

of transferring all of my materials and assessments over to the Schoology platform and have had

moderate success thus far. I hope to be able to continue to work through the growing pains of

this new software as the year moves on. So far I have been happy to see that my frustrations with

Edmodo have been alleviated by using Schoology and that Schoology is much more user-

friendly with respect to organization and student use.

Another goal of mine for the year would be to hopefully provide an additional training to

the teachers at my school to help them in the implementation of a new technology in their own

classrooms. Because I hope to someday be a technology coach for my school, I would appreciate

the practice and feedback of providing teachers with a technology training that could help to

make their lives a little easier.

Personal Technology Plan for Achieving Technology Goals

In order to achieve my goal of implementing Schoology in my classroom this school year

I will continue to seek out help when needed from other teachers and technology coaches in my

school. I would like to participate in online trainings that could possibly familiarize myself with
PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 6

even more features of the site so that I will be able to share these features with my students.

Another course that I am taking this semester, Diffusion of Innovations, is requiring that my

group make a plan to introduce a new technology to a school. My group has decided to use

Schoology for this project and this means that I am researching even more features of the site to

potentially share with other members of my school. It would be wonderful if I would be able to

create a plan for my school that could hopefully encourage more teachers to use this technology

in their own classrooms. This project could also help me to achieve my second goal of providing

trainings for the teachers in my school related to a new technology. I would like to eventually

share this work with my administrators in the hopes that they will allow me to create a

professional development seminar to demonstrate the use of Schoology or another learning

management system that could help to alleviate some of the issues that teachers are currently

having in their own classrooms with trying to implement technology.