Educators facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement of the ISTE Standards for Students. The program shall prepare candidates who:
(i) Foster a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes in both independent and group settings;
(ii) Manage the use of technology and student learning strategies in a variety of environments such as digital platforms, virtual environments, hands-on makerspaces, or in the field;
(iii) Create learning opportunities that challenge students to use a design process and/or computational thinking to innovate and solve problems; and
(iv) Model and nurture creativity and creative expression to communicate ideas, knowledge or connections.
Before entering the instructional technology program, I had some experience conducting small group and large group professional development. I was still very new to teaching and had yet to fully learn instructional design principles as provided and tied to ISTE standards in this program. I can reflect back now and see how many stages of design I originally missed that would have improved my training efforts immensely.
Thankfully, during my time here in the program, I have been given numerous opportunities to practice instructional design principles from the first stage through analysis and reflection. Experiencing these scenarios has strengthened my understanding of research-based practices. My confidence level in my ability to design and facilitate learning through modules with technology is high.
Included in my practices during the program are the online staff development course, the instructional design unit, and digital design unit in the artifacts section below. Although my expertise were applied in many more settings and scenarios than these, I do believe that these particular examples best represent the facilitator standard best.
The professional development course was designed to provide educators the opportunity to participate in and practice the use of a new technology tool for student engagement. Provided to them were opportunities to display what they knew, enhance their understanding, apply features demonstrated throughout the interactive lesson in a lesson draft of their own creation, and demonstrate what they learned through a post assessment.
The instructional design unit allowed students to learn and practice multiplicative comparison understandings in various digital settings and then present a creative artifact of their own to demonstrate learning. This particular lesson met all of the criteria as outlined by the standard above from the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.
The last artifact included here is the digital citizenship unit which was designed to teach students about safety and privacy online while also taking ownership of their own tendencies and looking for ways to improve based on what they learned. The technology used for this unit was interactive and required significant internal reflection.
Click the above link to access the online staff development course.
Click the link above to access the online digital citizenship unit designed for the practicum course.