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Student-Centered Learning
Student-Centered Learning
1.1 Candidates will be able to design meaningful activities and learning experiences that incorporate the guiding principles of Universal Design for Learning and appropriate technology tools and resources.
In ED602, I was introduced to the concept of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and its many implications for promoting multiple means of engagement, action and expression, and representation. I learned how crucial it was to create lessons, units, and activities with every student in mind, especially those who may have some learning difference, disability, or accessibility concern. As a part of my Tri-Project for ED602, I discovered the CAST Book Creator, which allows educators to transform traditional texts into interactive online texts that appeal and are accessible to all students. The Book Creator allows you to add audio and links to help explain or go into more depth with words, themes, and content.
As we were working with Macbeth at the time in my British Literature class, I chose to test the Book Creator with Act III of the play. My artifact below shows the fruit of my labors. What I discovered was, although it took a significant amount of time to build, I could control all the features that I wanted to add. I enable a glossary for more difficult words, lots of audio for students who had a more difficult time reading text, and thought-provoking questions throughout the scenes to help students reflect on what was happening as they read the act.
In this way, I completely revitalized my Macbeth lessons and the way students approached the play, and made huge strides in aligning my classroom with the guiding principles of UDL, upgrading the means of engagement, action and expression, and representation of a play taught in all-too traditional a manner in a majority of classrooms.
1.2 Candidates will be able to apply a learner-centered framework, including learner-centered principles, to the development of learning activities.
In ED602, I kept a Reflective Journal that detailed my journey through the Learner-Centered Principles (LCPs) that we were discussing. The LCPs are fourteen guiding principles educators use to create a space that focuses on the learner. Everything in the classroom begins and ends with these learners in the LCP framework. Throughout my Journal, I critique my own classroom, asking myself what I do well and where I still need work, and I reflect on which of the specific LCPs I already honor and which I need to incorporate more. The Reflective Journal has become one of my favorite projects in this program, and I have referred to it repeatedly through the past two years. I helps me keep an eye on how I am creating learning objectives and assessments, and it is a constant reminder to me to keep every learner in mind.
Another artifact from ED602 that I included was a report I did for the Tri-Project where I conducted interviews with several students at my school to clarify their ideas of how well my school focused on the LCPs. This was more of a research project where I was able to compare what my school thought it did well to what its stakeholders actually believed. The goal of this report was to determine where I might be able to suggest changes based on what my students said. I was overwhelmed by the results, as many students portrayed a different reality from what our school imagined itself to be, and these interviews become one of the foundational documents of my eventual Internship project.
1.3 Candidates will be able to select, evaluate, and facilitate the use of adaptive and assistive technologies to support student learning.
In ET620, our cohort were challenged to contemplate and evaluate technology tools before we introduced them to the classroom in order to better facilitate the use of technologies that not only supported student learning and achievement but also were accessible to a wide range of learning styles. A perfect example of this was my DDD-E project. The DDD-E Model stands for Decide, Design, Develop, and Evaluate, and this model provides a framework by which an educator can create engaging and fulfilling multimedia activities for all students.
Ultimately, I decided to have my students in African American Literature produce digital stories of a character from Toni Morrison's Beloved. They needed to create a storyboard, create the story in Google Slides, and produce voiceovers with Audacity. Students formed groups and each student in the group chose a role that he felt comfortable with, and he used his expertise to add to the group product. This project engaged students and provided a depth of undertanding for the characters that a typical response did not. Students shared their digital stories with each other in a jigsaw format, so every character in the novel has a digital story composed about them.
This project was interesting because some students had to learn new technologies before completing their portion of the group project. We had instruction on Google Slides and Audacity, but students remained engaged the whole time because they were excited to be using varied tools that let them understand the content of the novel in a unique way, and this is a project I will be repeating in the future.
1.4 Candidates model and promote diversity, cultural understanding, and global awareness by using digital-age communication and collaboration tools to interact locally and globally.
To be honest, throughout the EdTech Master's Program, I have no artifacts showing my prowess in this objective. I searched through all my classes' assignments, and the issue I kept running into was not a bad one, but it prevented me from specifically achieving this objective. We simply had too much choice! There were some assignments that would have helped me achieve this goal, but those projects allowed for options, and inevitably, I chose a project that took me in another direction.
I do understand the importance of this objective, and I have made strides on my own toward fulfilling the objective. In June, Christine Donnelly and I conducted a Mystery Skype project with her class where they attempted to figure out where I was via Skype and a game of Twenty Questions. It was fun watching them connect with someone via Skype and using context clues to deduce where I was. In my own classes, I have been developing two plans for the 2018-2019 school year.
One of my more recent forays into digital-age communications has been helping my students communicate and collaborate locally and globally. Especially in my World Literature classes, a connection to other cultures and diverse people is a necessity, and while we have used tools like Google Maps to take virtual field trips to the areas we have studied (Nigeria, Afghanistan, Greece), actually connecting with others to better understand their cultures and their lives is integral to a more complete learning experience.
I have two methods of introducing my students to a wider audience. The first is through podcasting. I have used Anchor to make my own podcasts and connect with educators around the world, and my students will be using this tool in the upcoming school year to create podcasts indicidually and in groups to address topics that appear in our literature. Next year, I will teaching African American Literature and American Literature, so connecting with others, both inside and outside of America, is crucial. Much of our early African American Literature curriculum deals with the men and women who were kidnapped from Africa and brought to the New World. Connecting with educators and students in the countries we will be studying will be aided by Anchor podcasts.
As a Flipgid fanatic, I have instituted a new way to use Flipgrid to connect with other classrooms, much like a pen pal system of the past. This method, called #GridPals, was created by Bonnie McClelland and she pairs classrooms from around the world together in an attempt to foster communication and collaboration. My classrooms will be engaged with this project next year, with the goal being to be paired with a class studying a similar topic to us but in a different part of the world. In this way, students will be able to understand how students from other cultures understand themes and content that we are reading, and we will be able to share thoughts via Flipgrid and, hopefully, expand to a Skyped, synchronous class.
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