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Module 1
"Your task this week will be to begin this process by reflecting upon the readings and your current state of mind. Use the following prompts to help guide your reflections:
- Where are you now, in terms of your own teaching and professional practice and the inclusion of educational technology in that process?
- What kind of change do you hope to see as a result of this class?
- How might your knowledge and experiences influence the actions of those around you"
I think I've come a long way since my first attempts at integrating technology into my classroom lessons. In part, the EDTECH program at Boise State University has helped foster instructional growth and technological understanding in a way that has allowed me to improve over time. In general, I enjoy learning about new ways teachers can integrate and enhance their practice with technology, and while I am no longer actively implementing technology in my own classroom, I like helping others consider how technology might assist them and their students in reaching a goal more effectively. My current role requires that I evaluate various digital educational resources that are used for teacher and administrator professional development, and through a resource assessment process I help make sure that teachers have access to content that is pedagogically sound, well-researched, and reflects a strong understanding of design principles.
What I hope to see change as a result of this class is manifold. I plan to grow an appreciation and deeper understanding of how educational technology has evolved over time, learn how different approaches and theoretical frameworks have caused branching in the study and implementation of educational technology, and further develop my own framework for design and evaluation of educational technology.
It is my hope that I will have many opportunities to share this new knowledge with others that are invested in improving Education. To do this, I will continue to learn about the principles of effective educational technology and help other student learning stakeholders implement new, vetted ideas into their practice and design. However, this will not be an easy task! In the relatively short time I’ve spent in my new role curating professional development resources for teachers, I learned that having access to resources and wanting to use them are just a few steps towards starting to enhance practice with technology. I’ve learned as a teacher and through conversation with many of my peers that limited time to learn about using technology in the classroom is often perceived as the major barrier to improving practice with technology. As Valdez et al. (2000, p. 5) note in “Computer-Based Technology and Learning: Evolving Uses and Expectations,” while “Technology makes learning more interactive, enjoyable, and customizable,” which can in turn positively influence a student’s learning experience in the classroom, “the extent to which teachers are given time and access to pertinent training to use computers to support learning plays a major role in determining whether or not technology has a positive impact on achievement.” With that in mind, I also hope to influence teachers, administrators, and policy advocates to consider the impact a perceived (or actual) lack of time for learning might negatively influence the power of technology in the classroom.
References
Valdez, G. et al., (2000). Computer-Based Technology and Learning: Evolving Uses and Expectations. North Central Regional Technology in Education Consortium.
Module 2
For your Module 2 reflection activity begin creating linkages between your own epistemological beliefs and your classroom instruction. Do you see inconsistencies in what you do and what you believe? See if you can extend your thinking to include ways in which you incorporate technology into your curriculum. For example, drill and practice software used for test preparation and/or remediation fit most behaviorist learning theories which fall under objectivist epistemologies. Would this necessarily fit with your own beliefs about the nature of learning?
I started my career in education as an English teacher at a night school program for high school students. It was my first time trying to design curricula and structure learning, and while the instructors at the college of education I attended the year before helped me understand and incorporate diverse teaching strategies into my practice, I noticed during my first few lesson planning sessions that I would occasionally try to slip a lengthy lecture component into my lesson plan, something I had been taught to avoid. Sometimes I would notice right away, other times I would not. In these moments of realization I would reflect on how, after years of formal study and guidance, I could not completely eradicate lecturing from my mind as a desirable way to share ideas with students.
In part, I think what made this challenging was that many of my teachers over decades of instruction used the lecture as a way to communicate with their students and transmit information. As a student, I created a strong connection between lecturing and what a teacher is suppose to do. To apply the discussion of Behaviorism by Ertmer and Newby (1993, p. 55) to my conduct as a teacher, through a Behaviorist’s lens it may appear that the decisions I made as a teacher were previously conditioned by repeatedly experiencing actions and results as a student in the very specific environment of the classroom. The lecture equals teaching connection was so strong, it seemed, that even two years of study and practice that discouraged long lectures did not immediately make a lasting change.
As a teacher, I was having difficulty incorporating new knowledge into my existing schema, and it took time and considerable effort to develop new ways of thinking about “educating.” It felt disruptive, uncomfortable and risky. However, once I started to see evidence of success, the risk element seemed to dissipate, soon followed by a sense of comfort. Eventually, I wasn’t thinking about leaving long lectures out of my lessons as something disruptive; I wasn’t thinking about it at all.
It is this same process that I think many educators go through when trying to incorporate various technology in their lessons. It might be hardware or software, such as the use of tablets in Kindergarten classrooms so that students can use a literacy app or data recording software for collecting information during a biology lab. It might be a new approach, such as the flipped classroom model or leveraging the Internet to connect students to teachers around the world. However technology is used, it can be challenging to try something new and the fear of failure can be very real, especially when student learning is partly dependent on the teacher’s design and implementation of a learning plan. To do it well, it might require rethinking what it means to educate and what tools and methods are used to do so. It takes deliberate effort, evidence of success, support from a More Knowledgeable Other, and an acceptance of temporary discomfort as part of growth. It might be much simpler to do what we’ve always done because it is what we are comfortably use to. Fortunately, however, there are some amazing educators in the world that embrace the opportunities to develop learning experiences that are better for their students than what existed before no matter how uncomfortable and taxing it may be.
References
Ertmer, P.A., & Newby, T.J. (1993). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 6(4), 50-72.
Module 3
In your Module 3 Reflection extend your linkages between theories of learning, theories of educational technology and your own classroom instruction.
This module provided a lot of opportunities for discovery. For the jigsaw assignment, I focused on Student-Centered Learning Environments, or SLEs, and learned about the challenges and benefits of creating such environments for students. For the annotated bibliography, I collected journal articles and information on emerging trends in educational technology, and I learned that while new technologies promise better ways for students to create and teachers to educate, many gaps in training and preparedness are causing slow adoption and spotty implementation in classrooms across the country.
It is this last point I’d like to explore in greater detail by connecting it to my experience as a teacher. When I first began teaching, I worked in a rural middle school that had little more than a state mandated technology initiative and the minimum amount of resources to implement the ambitious plans for students to become quickly technologically literate. Some of the impediments included lack of teacher training, lack of technical equipment for all students, and poor maintenance of equipment in the school.
I can remember learning from a colleague that on one occasion, all issues popped up at once in the (yes the) school computer lab. She told me that on the one day she was able to snag a coveted and highly-sought-after spot in the lab, everything seemed to go wrong. What happened was she had brought her English 7 class in for the period to perform some online research, but when they all arrived, she found only 15 working computers for her class of 27; some of the computers worked, but were missing necessary peripherals. Apprehensive about her ability to troubleshoot “even the smallest tech problem,” she gave up on any computer that didn’t immediately turn on and act as expected.
Of course, she didn’t discover the problem until the class had attempted to get to work and only half had working machines - a situation her middle school students immediately identified as unfair. Student pandemonium ensued. Unprepared to reconfigure the assignment on-the-fly for cooperative research and regain control of her upset students, she and her class retreated to her classroom in defeat.
When I read about the pedagogical “promise” of SLEs and Web 2.0for this module, I couldn't help but think of my colleague in her state of despair. While there are many opportunities to enhance learning with technology and provide optimal, tech-scaffolded learning environments that are student centered, it seems absolutely vital to have at least working technology and the technical training to bring these ideas to life. Not all schools do. Until some of the basic issues of hardware sufficiency and training are addressed, it seems that the benefits of new learning environments created by emerging technology will only reach some students, not all.
Course Reflection
Unlike other courses in the educational technology program, this course required a great deal of peer collaboration and peer feedback. I was profoundly impacted by how much I learned while reading the work of my peers with a critical eye. I was forced, in a sense, to focus in an active way that is very different from passive reading. To elaborate, when the pressure is on me to provide insight and suggestions for improvement, it requires a depth of understanding of the content in order to make reasonable suggestions.
My thoughts about teaching were impacted significantly by the activities in this course. There is no doubt in my mind that I will incorporate many of the constructivist ideas for deep and sustained learning into my understanding of good instructional design. While researching constructivism in this class as one of many epistemologies, I had the chance to compare many of its tenets to those of other competing schools of thought. The comparison helped me better understand where the different epistemologies differ and overlap, and after discussing my findings with peers in our online forum, I felt more confident than before speaking about the different epistemological concepts that underlie instructional decisions. I found it impressive that seven years after initially studying theories of knowledge in my teacher preparation coursework, I still had misunderstanding to correct and much to learn.
I am fortunate to leave this course with many ideas to incorporate into my practice. In Module three of the course, for example, we participated in a jigsaw activity that allowed the class to tackle a complex text and come out with a shared understanding of salient points made in each chapter. I found this to be an impressive and useful activity in the course, and one that I think educators of secondary and adult students should attempt. For our assignment, we split a text into different chapters and divided the class into different groups assigned to each chapter. After completing the reading individually, we posted some notes in the form of a summary to our assigned group message board online. After comparing notes, we completed a group summary of the text and shared it with the rest of the class. This process was very effective at causing me to work with the material for a sustained period of time, and as a result, I was able to usefully recall many of the concepts covered in the chapter while writing my synthesis paper.
Finally, this course was designed to help students create artifacts that comply with the AECT standards. There are three major artifacts that I have added to my portfolio this semester. The first, an annotated bibliography. This assignment is related to the standard 4.4 Information Management. The bibliography contains commentary on research around a cohesive topic and demonstrates my ability to plan and process information in order to provide resources for learning.
The second assignment is the Theories of Learning paper. This assignment is related to the standard 1.4 Learner Characteristics. The assignment required a solid understanding of major theoretical schools of thought in order to differentiate between epistemological beliefs and theories of instruction. In this way, I created an artifact that demonstrates a grasp of a learner’s experiential background that impacts the effectiveness of a learning process.
Lastly, the peer review activity for the synthesis paper. This assignment is related to numerous AECT standards, but is an outstanding example of an artifact for standard 5.2 Criterion-Reference Measurement. The assignment required that we read a draft-version of a peer’s final synthesis paper and, using a rubric, provide feedback. This helped me practice using techniques for determining learner master of pre-specified content. To see how these and other assignments map to the AECT standards, please see the chart below.
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