Reflecting on the entire course, the biggest takeaway for me personally is that it's not really that hard to integrate technology into classrooms, but it is very important to be mindful of the goals and objectives of technology and how it can best serve our students.
As for the AECT standards, I have gained more experience in exploring instructional strategies, instructional systems design, learner characteristics, problem analysis, and implementation from completing the course activities. While I can't say that at this point in time that I have "mastered" all of the AECT standards, I see how this particular course has been a great piece of the puzzle and provided me with excellent experiences in many key areas.
As a professional, I am proud to say that this is yet another class where I have learned things I have implemented into my teaching. I am currently getting ready to teach my first-ever Economics and Personal Finance course and I plan to use several of the materials I created in this course for my students. I feel more confident in my ability to learn about new technology and actually implement it into my online teaching whereas when I typically attend professional development activities, I rarely actually implement the content I learn from them. There is also something to be said about being in a course that requires hands-on participation like this one. From actually doing these activities, I am more likely to try making new things. If I don't like them, or if the students don't respond well, I am not obligated to keep anything I make. I can scrap it completely or make changes until it works for everyone. I don't feel afraid to "make a mistake" anymore when it comes to implementing new technology into my teaching.
I thought our textbook was a great resource and this is actually a book I am glad I purchased outright as I will likely go back and revisit some of these topics when I create my own professional development content for the educators on my team during the next school year. The readings guided us through the theory and gave us important new ideas to consider while completing our projects for the course.
Assessing my Performance:
I would rate my content portion to be in the proficient category. I didn't always go deep into depth about my own real-world experiences but in many of my posts, I did try to make connections to other related topics or things I did in the past.
In the Readings and Resources category, I would rate myself as outstanding as I did my best to make sure I cited my sources in the proper APA style.
In the timeliness category, I would rate myself as proficient. I often posted at the last minute and didn't allow my classmates time to respond to my content. I was not outstanding in this category and I apologize for that. I knew my schedule was going to be packed during this session, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to take the class.
I always made sure to respond to 2 of my fellow students. I think it's important to hear what my classmates have to say on these topics and I wanted to leave words of encouragement to help them finish the course strong.
I truly enjoyed the blogging experience with this class. It was a unique way for me to summarize the things I've learned and share my thoughts with others. Thank you!
Citations:
Association for Educational Communications and Technology. (2012). AECT standards, 2012 version. AECT Standards, 2012 version. https://www.aect.org/docs/AECTstandards2012.pdf
I have to start my blog entry by challenging the notion that assistive technologies may only be used by a small number of people. Assistive technologies can be useful for everyone for many reasons. Screenreading tools, closed captioning on videos and other assistive technologies to make content more accessible to those with disabilities can help everyone, not just those who have disabilities. Having a voice read aloud the text you are trying to read and comprehend can make it easier to follow and absorb the content. While watching a video, it is easier to have the spoken words appear as captions on the screen in case you miss what was said the first time around. More and more schools are serving people whose mother tongue may be different from the one in which the content is presented in. Having access to accessibility tools may be extremely helpful for those students and lead to better academic outcomes.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1972 requires that government entities must accommodate those who need accommodations to access government services. As most schools accept federal funding in some form, they are required to make our materials accessible for all students as a condition of receiving federal funding. While it may take some additional time and expense to do this, the benefit of federal funding offsets the cost of making accommodations for all students.
As an educator, I do understand that budgets are often very tight, but many of the things educators can do to make their content more accessible do not necessarily cost much money to implement, if any. Dr. Sheryl Burgstahler shares a checklist of items that educators can use to make their online content more accessible. Most of these items do not require a great deal of time to implement and do not require very much effort. However, they make a great deal of difference to those who need these accommodations.
In my own personal experience as an online educator, I will admit that initially creating content with accessibility in mind did take more time and effort. As a more seasoned veteran educator, ensuring that the content I create for my courses meets UDL standards does not take much additional time and it becomes second nature. I know how to make my content accessible to all students and the requirements for the types of content I produce.
Burgstahler, S. (2021). 20 tips for teaching an accessible online course. 20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course | DO-IT. https://www.washington.edu/doit/20-tips-teaching-accessible-online-course
Technology helps students build stronger connections to the content we teach. This helps them to engage with the content and retain more of the information we share with them.
When I was in high school, my first introduction to the stock market game was during my 12th grade American History course. Our teacher stood up in front of the class and gave a brief overview of the stock market and provided us with a handout on how the game worked, and our class had access to a single newspaper from yesterday with the prices from the closing bell with each ticker name printed in small print across several pages. It was quite challenging to find the stocks we wanted to buy, let alone have real time access to the price we would need to pay for shares of those stocks and research about the companies we liked.
Now students have access to endless information about stocks, investment strategies and real time data to help them conduct company research and decide how they want to invest their money when playing the stock market game. This allows students to engage with the content in new, deeper ways than before. As our society continues to change, students will need to have a solid understanding of how investing for the future works if they plan to retire at any point in their lives.
In his article "The 6 Best Stock Market Games To Teach Kids About Investing", Jonathan Sanchez shares resources students can use to increase their knowledge about investing through tech tools and games that make the experience fun and engaging. When students have an opportunity to learn about investing in a simulated environment where there is no risk of losing real capital, students can learn important lessons about investing and formulate good strategies to grow their wealth. It will be exciting to see students continue to engage and interact with new resources to help students learn about investing as technology continues to change our world.
Sanchez, J. (2022, October 27). The 6 best stock market games to teach kids about investing. Wealth of Geeks. https://wealthofgeeks.com/best-stock-market-games/
Examining Acceptable Use Policies
The internet can be a wild place, especially on social media sites. Students, especially those in a K-12 setting, need guidelines in place from the start to establish expectations of how to conduct themselves in an online environment that is school related.
Roblyer and Hughes explain that teachers must consider the acceptable use policies of their schools, especially in the areas of data privacy, copyright law and rights to intellectual property, IT security, using good netiquette, and setting appropriate boundaries with employee-student relationships. (Hughes & Roblyer, 2019, p. 89).
As I am a K-12 teacher, I started this assignment by reading the acceptable use policies of the two schools I teach for, which are NC Virtual in North Carolina and IDLA in Idaho. I then looked at the largest online school in the country at the state level and explored the acceptable use policy at Boise State to round out my 4 policies to explore.
NC Virtual does not have its own individual acceptable use policy as we are a state agency and are governed completely by the acceptable use policy that is in place for all state agencies in North Carolina. This document is a full five-page document that goes through in detail what the expectations are for users and the terms and conditions they agree to when using the state's technology in any capacity. The document is very thorough and it's clear that this was written by lawyers who are well-versed in technology and a solid acceptable use policy that will help keep end users safe and safeguard the state from frivolous lawsuits.
IDLA's policy is a three-page document that is less laden with legalese than NC Virtul's document. However, IDLA's document clearly states at the beginning of it that the acceptable use policy of the student's school districts is expected to be used in addition to IDLA's policy. This is a well written document but it is not as expansive as NC Virtual's. The content is a bit more geared toward promoting appropriate student conduct. IDLA serves students in the K-12 spectrum while NC Virtual only currently serves students in grades 6-12
Boise State University's acceptable use policy defines the scope of the policy and the standards that govern those who use their resources. The expectations of users are clearly defined and things they cannot do are also clearly outlined in the policy.
Florida Virtual is the nation's largest K-12 school at the state level. Their acceptable use policy is embedded in the student code of conduct document and also clearly outlines expectations of students and how they will use school resources.
A common trend I noticed across all acceptable use policies is that they all set the tone for reasonable behavior and acting with good digital citizenship at the core. Setting these expectations at the beginning of each course helps students to clearly understand what is expected of them and what behavior will not be tolerated.
References:
Hughes, J. E., & Roblyer, M. D. (2019). Integrating educational technology into teaching: Transforming learning across disciplines (8th ed.). Pearson.
Tech Trends in Education - Innovation on the Horizon
This week I read the NMC/CoSN Horizon Report that focused on the K-12 population as I teach primarily high school students. The report identified several long-term, mid-term and short-term trends related to the adoption of technology in K-12 education. Each of these trends are organically expanding as education changes to adapt to rapidly changing technology and to meet the demands of the 21st century workplace.
Within the next year or two, we will continue to see the rise of STEAM learning and coding as a literacy. The course I primarily teach (Japanese 1) does incorporate elements of science and technology in several of our culture discussions as Japan has deeply embraced technology in many ways and it has become a cornerstone of Japanese culture. Our textbook reading for this week also mentioned the importance incorporating writing across the curriculum as a component of technology integration (Hughes & Roblyer, 2019, p. 114). Two of our major projects incorporate that facet of learning and technology into our course. Coding is more than learning how to write commands and key in values into a computer. As a language teacher and someone who has a background in software development, coding truly is a language in itself. To properly code software to perform functions, programmers must understand how the programming language works and have clearly defined end goals for the software to accomplish in order to be successful (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 20). Teaching students to code helps students build literacy and problem solving skills that extend far beyond the ability to code and can help them succeed in the classroom and in the workplace.
In my own classroom experience, I have taught several students who are drawn to my subject area because they are studying robotics. I can't help but to notice that the students who are interested in robots tend to do well with Japanese sentence structure, which is quite different from English. Having that background in coding would certainly be helpful as they likely are constructing sentences from a programming oriented lens.
Within the next three to five years, K-12 education is expected to trend in the direction of redesigning learning spaces and focusing on measuring learning. As a teacher who has only formally taught online and never face to face, I am living proof that educators do not need to be in a physical classroom to reach students. For those brick and mortar schools that do remain, the design is trending toward creating spaces where students can collaborate with each other and take a more active role in more self directed learning instead of passively listening to instruction from a teacher in the front of the room (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 18). High stakes standardized achievement tests are also beginning to take a back seat to competency based learning activities that allow students to show what they know vs. being penalized for not knowing something (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 16). Our program uses the eLinguafolio tool that allows students to measure their proficiency in their new target language based on the state standards and showcase coursework they have done to prove their ability to use Japanese in a variety of situations. This tool also inspires students to push to the next level of proficiency and produces a sense of pride and satisfaction with what they have accomplished in class.
The trends that will shape education in the five years and beyond timeframe are advancing cultures of innovation and adopting deeper learning approaches. The 21st century workplace will be a fast paced and constantly evolving place where workers will need to adapt quickly and embrace new technology and paradigms to solve problems. Simply being able to recite facts from memory will not be enough to solve the problems they will encounter. Experiences like inquiry and project based learning powered by technology will help them learn how to learn and find the information they need to complete their tasks and create their own solutions to solve problems (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 14).
With the drastic changes coming to the 21st century workplace, schools will need to adapt in order to provide the students with the educational experiences they'll need to be successful. Both governments and corporations who wish to employ the next generation of workers will need to invest in making creative spaces where learning can occur in new ways. Educators will also need to adapt quickly to new paradigms in education as necessity drives innovation (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 12).
All of these trends will dramatically change the way we educate our students in both the short term and longer term future. It's very important for educators to be able to adapt quickly and embrace new methodologies to accommodate what our students will need to succeed as the world changes rapidly.
References:
Hughes, J. E., & Roblyer, M. D. (2019). Integrating educational technology into teaching: Transforming learning across disciplines (8th ed.). Pearson.
Tech Trends in Education - Innovation on the Horizon
This week I read the NMC/CoSN Horizon Report that focused on the K-12 population as I teach primarily high school students. The report identified several long-term, mid-term and short-term trends related to the adoption of technology in K-12 education. Each of these trends are organically expanding as education changes to adapt to rapidly changing technology and to meet the demands of the 21st century workplace.
Within the next year or two, we will continue to see the rise of STEAM learning and coding as a literacy. The course I primarily teach (Japanese 1) does incorporate elements of science and technology in several of our culture discussions as Japan has deeply embraced technology in many ways and it has become a cornerstone of Japanese culture. Our textbook reading for this week also mentioned the importance incorporating writing across the curriculum as a component of technology integration (Hughes & Roblyer, 2019, p. 114). Two of our major projects incorporate that facet of learning and technology into our course. Coding is more than learning how to write commands and key in values into a computer. As a language teacher and someone who has a background in software development, coding truly is a language in itself. To properly code software to perform functions, programmers must understand how the programming language works and have clearly defined end goals for the software to accomplish in order to be successful (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 20). Teaching students to code helps students build literacy and problem solving skills that extend far beyond the ability to code and can help them succeed in the classroom and in the workplace.
In my own classroom experience, I have taught several students who are drawn to my subject area because they are studying robotics. I can't help but to notice that the students who are interested in robots tend to do well with Japanese sentence structure, which is quite different from English. Having that background in coding would certainly be helpful as they likely are constructing sentences from a programming oriented lens.
Within the next three to five years, K-12 education is expected to trend in the direction of redesigning learning spaces and focusing on measuring learning. As a teacher who has only formally taught online and never face to face, I am living proof that educators do not need to be in a physical classroom to reach students. For those brick and mortar schools that do remain, the design is trending toward creating spaces where students can collaborate with each other and take a more active role in more self directed learning instead of passively listening to instruction from a teacher in the front of the room (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 18). High stakes standardized achievement tests are also beginning to take a back seat to competency based learning activities that allow students to show what they know vs. being penalized for not knowing something (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 16). Our program uses the eLinguafolio tool that allows students to measure their proficiency in their new target language based on the state standards and showcase coursework they have done to prove their ability to use Japanese in a variety of situations. This tool also inspires students to push to the next level of proficiency and produces a sense of pride and satisfaction with what they have accomplished in class.
The trends that will shape education in the five years and beyond timeframe are advancing cultures of innovation and adopting deeper learning approaches. The 21st century workplace will be a fast paced and constantly evolving place where workers will need to adapt quickly and embrace new technology and paradigms to solve problems. Simply being able to recite facts from memory will not be enough to solve the problems they will encounter. Experiences like inquiry and project based learning powered by technology will help them learn how to learn and find the information they need to complete their tasks and create their own solutions to solve problems (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 14).
With the drastic changes coming to the 21st century workplace, schools will need to adapt in order to provide the students with the educational experiences they'll need to be successful. Both governments and corporations who wish to employ the next generation of workers will need to invest in making creative spaces where learning can occur in new ways. Educators will also need to adapt quickly to new paradigms in education as necessity drives innovation (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 12).
All of these trends will dramatically change the way we educate our students in both the short term and longer term future. It's very important for educators to be able to adapt quickly and embrace new methodologies to accommodate what our students will need to succeed as the world changes rapidly.
References:
Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., and Hall Giesinger, C. (Freeman et al., 2017). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K–12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
Hughes, J. E., & Roblyer, M. D. (2019). Integrating educational technology into teaching: Transforming learning across disciplines (8th ed.). Pearson.
Sarah's Mission/Vision Statement
Heraclitus is credited with saying the timeless quote "The only constant is change." One of the fields that best encompasses this idea is the field of Educational Technology. The learners of the 21st century are adapting to a world that is changing quickly. Technology allows students to engage in learning at deeper levels today than at any point in history and they require timely access to new knowledge (Blair, 2012).
The big and overriding goal of Educational Technology in the teaching-learning environment is no longer teaching students information. Students can use technology to access vast amounts of information in seconds. The new goal is to help students establish frameworks they can use to explore challenges, find knowledge, bridge gaps and create solutions to problems they may encounter in the 21st-century workplace.
The big issues educational technology should address in the teaching-learning environment are how educators can grow beyond the traditional education paradigms where the learner is passively learning and retaining information into one where students are using the knowledge they found in new ways to create new things. The ISTE Technology Integration Matrix provides a great roadmap for educators to evolve the practice of teaching to take the learning experience to new heights for students (Maclemale, 2019). This can be leveraged to examine old ways of teaching and consider new ways to meet our state-mandated standards while getting students ready to face the challenges of the 21st century.
I was quite unprepared to enter the 21st-century workplace after completing high school and finishing my undergraduate degree. I found my first real job out of college as a consultant extremely overwhelming and stressful as the answers I needed for my job were not clearly spelled out in a textbook. I was often in situations where my clients would look to me to solve their problems but I did not feel confident even considering solutions that were not "by the book" so to speak. As I gained work experience in the corporate world, I realized that I needed to abandon the idea of looking for the "right" answer and use the knowledge and experience I acquired at my job to find innovative solutions that could solve real-world problems.
One of the biggest drivers of educational technology is the shift from direct instruction to constructed-based instruction. The direct instruction model is based on the idea that students are like empty vessels that must be filled with knowledge by an instructor who will provide that information to learners in a format where they will passively absorb information and knowledge (Hughes & Roblyer, 2019, p. 36).
The constructivist-based instruction model is coming to the forefront of education. In this framework, educators act more as facilitators of learning while the learners can find the knowledge they need on their own. Educators teach students how to learn rather than relying on an instructor to give them the knowledge (Hughes & Roblyer, 2019, p. 36). The change from the directed instruction model to the constructivist-based instruction model is driving educational technology as educators need new tools and resources to become facilitators of learning instead of providers of knowledge. This massive shift in education is what motivated me to study educational technology at Boise State and I look forward to the unfolding of this journey in the Integrating Technology course. 21st century educators must embrace the constant change that Heraclitus spoke of as technology continues to shape our world in new ways. This program is helping me grow exponentially as an educator.
References:
Blair, N. (2012, January). Technology integration for the new 21st Century learner. NAESP. https://www.naesp.org/resource/technology-integration-for-the-new-21st-century-learner/
Hughes, J. E., & Roblyer, M. D. (2019). Integrating educational technology into teaching: Transforming learning across disciplines (8th ed.). Pearson.
Maclemale, R. (2019). Matrix. TIM. https://fcit.usf.edu/matrix/matrix/