EDT 501

EDT 501 - Research, Trends, & Issues in Educational Technology

This course is designed to acquaint the students with research and issues facing education in the digital era. This course will look at the wide range of developments in technology and investigate the trends that are impacting the field of educational technology. Students explore and analyze key issues related to technology in the classroom of the twenty-first century.

Throughout the semester we were introduced to many learning theories and frameworks. Among those were:

• Situated Cognition

• Anchored Instruction

• Operant Conditioning

• Zone of Proximal Development

• TPCK Model

• Connected Learning

We also studied legal and ethical issues in Ed Tech, the Digital Divide and issues of access, digital citizenship, and open education.

Being that I came from a low-income community where there was a high population of technology-illiterate parents/adults, I am very interested and motivated to dive deeper into the Digital Divide and issues of access. I'd like to be involved in movements to potentially improve situation in my own community and others sharing similar struggles of limited access and literacy to technology.

Example 1: Conceptual Framework

My goal for this project was to create a framework that evaluates the effectiveness of educational technology based on 6 critical concepts. Technology for learning should be skill-strengthening, tolerable for learners, interactive, encourage regularity, be versatile within reason, and easy to use.