Teaching for Understanding with Technology (CEP 810)
Instructor: Carolyn McCarthy
Summer 2010
During this course, I was introduced to a variety of methods for integrating technology with academic content, and began to shift my views on how and what I teach. I developed the mindset that to make a real difference in education, technology must be used as a tool to enhance and extend the academic curriculum, with learning experiences that are grounded in important, relevant, and meaningful content. The technology can thus help students to reach educational goals that aren’t possible without the technology. During CEP 810, I developed a better framework for using technology to make a difference in students’ academic and social growth. I also gained experience using specific productivity and web-based technologies to improve student learning. I became more comfortable experimenting with unfamiliar technologies, as well.
CEP 811 helped me to use the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to not only reach students typically “in the margins,” but also to provide all students with more flexible and fair learning opportunities. I created my first website using Weebly, a platform I am now well familiar with and have used many times. I also learned how to create a STAIR (stand-alone instructional resource) to help my students learn in a self-paced, one-on-one setting, with immediate feedback, extra support to those who need it, and the ability for those who don’t to move forward more quickly. I used VoiceThread to develop an interactive, innovative book report project, and learned to use the VoiceThread4Education wiki to plan collaborative learning opportunities with teachers and students in other geographical locations.
During CEP 812, I used my growing body of experience in educational technology to help solve educational problems and assist the learning of others. As my main project for this course, I created a website to help motivate my students to practice accurate and efficient keyboarding strategies outside of school. I also gained experience using slideshare.net to create and share instructional resources with others. As part of a group project, I created a slidecast with a voiceover to teach educators how Google Docs can enhance their productivity, teaching, and learning. I became comfortable using a blog to share information, experiences, and artifacts with others. While creating the blog, I also learned ways in which blogging can be used to improve student learning.
Annotated Transcript
Below I describe each of the courses I completed during the Master's in Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. I include the valuable knowledge and skills I gained from each.
CEP 800 covered a variety of topics related to the psychology of learning. Among these were the significant role that students’ prior knowledge and misconceptions can play in their learning, and the importance of opportunities to actively learn from and with their peers. I explored social constructivism in depth during this course. This learning theory helped me to develop my major project, which was a fourth grade blog through which students collectively built knowledge and understandings about digital citizenship and cyber safety. I also gained experience working with Audacity to create and edit audio projects during this course, which has proven useful to me in a variety of situations since.
CEP 815 facilitated valuable learning about leadership, leadership in education, and leadership in technology and education. One of the most influential aspects of this course for me was exploring effective leaders of the past and present, and learning about the personal mindsets, characteristics, habits, and values that contributed to their success and influence. This helped me to strategically develop my own leadership skills, as well as to recognize these qualities in the people with whom I work. Other topics I explored in this course included developing a self-funding technology purchase proposal, creating a Prezi presentation on managing complex change, designing a stakeholder survey, and writing a policy brief.
This course opened my eyes to the wealth of educational research which has shaped the nature of education in the past and present, and which will likely continue to do so in the future. The complexity of research, and the obstacles to obtaining and using reliable, valid, and useful results, were also explored. A major goal of this course was to develop an action research project. I designed a research study proposal to explore educational blogging and how it might be used to improve student writing quality. The study includes a rationale and background, a literature review, and a description of my plan, methods, data analysis, and evaluation. It is something that could potentially be carried out at the school at which I work.
CEP 820 gave me significant experience in building and designing an online course. I learned firsthand that many decisions regarding design and pedagogy go into creating a course that is taught online, and that the knowledge and skills needed are somewhat different from those of a typical “in-person” teacher. I explored different course management systems in the context of which would best support my needs, used goals and standards as the foundation for content-rich online activities, and learned about the benefits and potential pitfalls of online learning environments. As a major project for this course, I chose to use Blackboard’s CourseSites to build an online course module on the topic of digital citizenship.
During CEP 807, I created this very website. Over the course of the semester, I constructed an online master’s portfolio which includes a showcase of professional work and student samples, an annotated transcript of the courses I took and how they impacted me, a resume, and more. The process of writing the three reflective essays I included has helped me to become conscious of how much I’ve grown, as well as to make a plan for my future learning. In the last of these essays, I was able to synthesize my thoughts on the knowledge and skills I have gained over the past four years, along with the ways my teaching practice has been positively influenced by the master’s program.
In this course, I developed a deep awareness of the importance of design in teaching and learning experiences and in the larger world. CEP 817 helped me to explore examples of good and bad design, as well as essential characteristics of great websites. The main project was to create a web resource which taught an important topic to a specific audience. As I built my website on cyber bullying, I developed a variety of web design skills and learned how to balance usability and aesthetics with rich content, meaningful multimedia experiences, and the needs of the users. This course directly impacted my teaching practice, as I used the website I created to teach my fourth grade students how to recognize, deal with, and prevent cyber bullying.
Adapting Innovative Technology to Education (CEP 811)
Instructor: Emily Stone
Fall 2010
Applying Educational Technology to Issues of Practice (CEP 812)
Instructor: Nancy Ayers
Spring 2011
Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners (TE 846)
Instructor: Dr. Gary Troia
Spring 2012
This course provided me with valuable insight on the processes which influence successful reading and comprehension, with a special focus on struggling literacy learners. I learned a variety of instructional practices and adaptations to help all students to succeed in processes ranging from phonics to constructing meaning from text. Much of my knowledge from this course was developed first hand through a project in which I delivered two lessons to an individual student who struggled with reading. I taught this child ways to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word, as well as to use diphthong patterns to spell words more accurately. Through a pre- and post-assessment, observation, analysis, and reflection, I was able to determine that my interventions made a noticeable difference.
Learning in School and Other Settings (CEP 800)
Instructor: Dr. Danah Henriksen
Fall 2012
Technology and Leadership (CEP 815)
Instructors: Josh Rosenberg and Luke Rapa
Spring 2013
Teaching Students Online (CEP 820)
Instructors: Anne Heintz and Sandra Sawaya
Summer 2013
Approaches to Educational Research (CEP 822)
Instructor: Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf
Fall 2013
Learning Technology By Design (CEP 817)
Instructors: Dr. Punya Mishra and Jon Good
Spring 2014
Capstone in Educational Technology (CEP 807)
Instructors: Dr. Matthew Koehler, Brittany Dillman, Spencer Greenhalgh, and Josh Rosenberg
Summer 2014