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Semester Goals

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This semester we set personal technology goals to help further integrate technology into our lives, or to “practice what we preach” inside of the classroom as well as outside of the classroom. The goals I set at the beginning of the semester were to further develop my LinkedIn profile, track my fitness data via MyFitnessPal, and look for an app that can help me be more organized or productive. My LinkedIn profile did not grow as I originally intended. I did add a few new connections but found that many of the teachers I work with do not have LinkedIn accounts, obviously making it difficult to virtually connect with them. Though this was a goal of mine, I did get to do a lot of in-person networking with teachers and other staff this semester. In this situation, the use of LinkedIn would only be a substitution on the SAMR model of technology integration when it comes to networking within districts and buildings where I already have relationships. I will continue to try to expand my Lin...
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Teaching in the Digital Age

Technology is doing more with less. As resources become more widely available, students are now capable of learning more, faster. Educational technology is a tool that teachers can use to help our students become problem solvers and apply their knowledge to real world problems. “What you know” is no longer the most important thing, as we can easily find answers on the internet. But developing technologies that help us solve the problems of human kind by applying our content knowledge will always be a critical skill. Technology allows our students to have more individualized learning, providing opportunities to discover interests and passions, and move at a pace that is right for them. As technology is used more frequently in education, many believe the role of the teacher is on the path to becoming obsolete. However, that is not true, but the role of the educator is shifting from knowledge giver to that of a facilitator. Teachers must show the proper use of technology, and be the confi...
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Participatory Culture in the Classroom

Participatory Culture is an environment that allows for the easy sharing of artistic expression and civic engagement. Members of the community are encouraged to participate and share their work and ideas. A sense of belonging is shared among members. This style of learning can greatly benefit our students, as this what many of them encounter outside of the classroom. Types of these participatory cultures include Affiliations: members of a community centered on media (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) Expressions: producing of new creative materials (fanfiction, mash-ups, etc.) Collaborative Problem Solving: working together in teams to complete tasks (Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming etc.) Circulations: Shaping the flow of media (podcasts, blogs) Embracing participatory culture in the elementary classroom leads to the fostering of a higher level dynamic literacy within our students. Though these processes students develop skills such as multitasking, collective intelligence, neg...
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Immersive Learning: Creating "an" experience

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Many educators I know, including myself, would agree with the Deweyan idea that the goal of education is to help students lead lives rich in worthwhile experiences. We strive to broaden horizons and grow perspective. The difference for our students is how we go about reaching those goals. For Dewey, it was the difference between ordinary experience and “an” experience. The ordinary experience is one that occurs simply because we as humans interact with our environment and therefore, naturally have experiences. These events happen through the mere course of living, and are not further developed beyond this surface level. In contrast to ordinary experience, Dewey proposed the idea of “an” experience. It is here where material “runs its course through to the end”. In such experiences, a problem is solved, a game is played to the end, a situation is rounded out and it's elements connected in unity to one another. It is an event of thinking and meaning driven by anticipation of the en...
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SAMR and TPACK: Frameworks for Tech in the Classroom

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SAMR is a framework for technology integration that was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura. SAMR is an acronym for “Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition”. The SAMR framework represents the spectrum of technology usage in the classroom. At one end, there is substitution, where technology is used as a replacement. This includes using electronic copies of texts or documents, as well as students using virtual presentation tools such as Powerpoint. In a similar fashion, the next rung on the ladder of SAMR is augmentation, which is the replacement of traditional tools with technological ones but with a significant increase in student productivity or capability. Both substitution and augmentation are considered “enhancements” which take traditional teaching up a notch or two. What comes next in SAMR is the transformation stage, or the top two rungs of the ladder. These steps, modification and redefinition, are when technology provides the students with experiences that pr...
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Does Technology Influence Learning?

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What is the role of media in the educational process? Is it a major factor or just an interchangeable tool? Researchers Clark and Kozma took a deeper look into this subject and formulated two opposing viewpoints. Clark (1994) viewed media as “mere vehicles that deliver instruction” to which any related benefits could be effectively replicated in an instructional method that did not contain media. On the other hand, Kozma (1994) takes a stance that media is a design science, to which humans have the ability to steer the direction of its progress. To Kozma, the real question to discuss was “will media be designed with the intent to influence learning?”. He believes that media’s underlying structure can support the cognitive and social processes we know to be apart of learning. Kozma believes Clark’s determination to separate method and medium is unnecessary. Both are apart of instructional design and should be valued as having an integral relationship. “In good designs, a medium's ca...
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Meaningful Learning with Technology

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Throughout my extensive education I do not believe I had a meaningful learning experience with technology until this current semester. Up until now, technology was just a means to an end. A way to submit assignments more efficiently or to save trees. My high school had more limited access to technology, so technology based projected had to be planned well in advanced by my teachers. In my undergrad, most of my assignments were simply essays that needed to be typed and occasionally could be turned in electronically. However, this semester I am taking a course about data literacy in social studies, and my professor is utilizing Scalar, an open source publishing website that allows us to easily upload visualizations and add text descriptions. The screenshot shown above was taken from our Scalar page. As we learn about different types of data visualizations, we then have to actively search credible examples and add them to a classroom board. As Jonassen discusses in the article “What Is ...
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