Introduction
During my journey through Michigan State University's Masters in Educational Technology (MAET) Program, I have developed, created, grown, and adapted my philosophical approach to teaching. I have been pushed to rethink my pedagogical beliefs on what education should look like and rethink the way that I utilize technology in my classroom. The following artifacts provide a brief overview of the creativity, skills, research, experiences, and philosophies that I have learned through my journey in the MAET program.
I have divided my artifacts into the following themes:
I have divided my artifacts into the following themes:
- Collaboration and Leadership
- Teaching Philosophy Inspiration
- Educational Technology Designs
Collaboration and Leadership
I find it a crucial part of being an educator to collaborate and discuss ideas with other educators. A school is more than just individual classrooms. It is a team of educators, support staff, and building staff working together to create a positive and safe learning environment for students. I feel it is important that I continue to grow my professional learning network in order to improve as an educator. My professional learning network is important in helping me gain new ideas to bring into my classroom. It is also vital in helping me share solutions to the problems within my school. The Master's in Educational Technology program at Michigan State University has allowed me to further my collaboration and leadership skills as well as help me develop skills to expand my professional learning network.
Solving Problems of PracticeMy coursework has allowed me to develop my leadership and collaboration skills. It is important for me understand the different teaching contexts and disciplines to be able to research and create effective solutions to assist my colleagues. My coursework gave me the opportunity to advise another fellow educator. I had to solve a problem of practice in a content area that I did not have experience or background knowledge in. Although my teaching background is in social studies, in order to fulfill a leadership and collaborator role, I created a lesson plan that for my colleague who is a high school math teacher. The prototype lesson plan I created was to help him solve his problem of practice: increasing his students performance on unit assessments in the content area of dilation.
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GREAT 17 ConferenceAn important part of being a leader and collaborator is being able to effectively share research and ideas with others. During the summer of 2017, my MAET program cohorts and I worked together to plan, research, and present in a educational technology conference in Galway, Ireland. The conference exemplifies the necessity and development of skills needed for successful collaboration and leadership. We created different teams to work on the logistics of the conference, promotion of the conference, scheduling of sessions, and creation of the conference website. Each member also collaborated with partners to create a presentation. I researched and presented information on Data Driven Learning and Differentiated Instruction to educators who attended the GREAT17 conference.
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Expanding my Professional Learning Network
The MAET program has set me on a path to continuously grow my professional learning network. I am now more connected to other educators, technology tools, and various social media platforms than ever before. I plan on continuing this process of expanding my professional learning network in order to help me continue to gather more ideas and research to help me shape my views as an educator. It will also continue to grow my teaching toolbox and inform the strategies I use as an educator. I have used Popplet, a web graphic organizer tool, to represent my professional learning network visually.
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Teaching Philosophy Inspirations
The MAET has changed the way that I approach my teaching instruction. I now approach my teaching and lesson designs with thinking about what I want students to explore and create. I believe that educators should design learning experiences that allow students a chance to explore, design, and create. Students should be doing much more than just understanding facts and gaining knowledge. Student learning should also include building skills to prepare them for solving problems in our 21st century society. I now firmly believe that showing off knowledge should be more than just being able to pass a standardized test, it should be showing off knowledge in a creative and innovative way!
Maker Education
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The idea of maker education has changed the way that I design activities for my students. It has led me to always think about redesigning my classroom to give students a chance to collaborate with one another and to allow students a chance to use their creativity. The infographic to the left that I created through Piktochart exemplifies the important lessons I learned through the research and use of maker education. It is now an important piece of my teaching philosophy and is one of the concepts I think about when designing learning experiences within my classroom.
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Rethinking Teaching
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Creating new innovative learning experiences to help our students succeed involves thinking about teaching in new and different ways. A constant problem that educators face is how to adapt teaching strategies, educational technology, and lesson designs to better reach their students. Through my research during my graduate program and my experiences being a classroom teacher, I have found that it is vital for me to constantly rethink teaching. As an educator this is a wicked problem that may never be solved due to the complexities of the variables in the situation. However, I feel it is a problem worth tackling since it allows all educators to improve their teaching and create innovative ways to address the larger problems in the education system. The infographic to the left that I created through Piktochart visually represents the research and perspectives that I have found in defining the wicked problem of "rethinking teaching".
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Understanding TPACK
One of the biggest additions to my teaching philosophy is the concept of TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge). When I create lessons and utilize technology in my classroom, I utilize TPACK by ensuring that I am getting to the "sweet spot" of using a combination of content knowledge, the best pedagogy, and technology to enhance the design of my learning experiences. In the following video below, it demonstrates the purpose and flexibility of TPACK. I was given a bowl, a plate, and a utensil chosen by someone who had no knowledge of my assigned task. They also chose from a set list of tasks at random to assign to me (it happened to be making a Nutella and jelly sandwich). In the video I am trying to show that even though I don't have the "best" tool for the job, I have the skills to be creative and "repurpose" my tool to achieve my objective.
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Educational Technology Designs
As I continue to grow as a teacher, I find it important to always evolve and adapt my teaching. Michigan State University's MAET program introduced me to new ways that I could incorporate technology and technology skills into my teaching. The program gave me new ideas to think about and include when I design learning experiences for my students.
"Repurposing" and TPACK Lesson
I created a lesson that repurposed a variety of materials that I found laying around my house and combined it with my Makey Makey. The purpose of this lesson plan is to showcase my understanding of TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge) Framework. In designing the lesson I combined all parts of TPACK. I combined the best use of the materials and the Makey Makey to enhance the learning experience for students surrounding the content of the Space Race. The pedagogy behind the activity is to help students be creative in developing and showing their knowledge of the Space Race. The lesson combines social studies content, writing skills, and the 21st Century Skills of basic programming. The activity utilizes the Makey Makey and the use of scratch.mit.edu. Below is a video to demonstrate a prototype product and the procedures of the lesson.
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Maker Education Lesson PlanThe concept of maker education has changed the way that I think as I design a learning experience for my classroom. I created a lesson that would include programming, creativity, and social studies content knowledge. The lesson utilized my research on personalized learning, interactive learning activities, Makey Makey, and scratch.mit.edu. The lesson activity would have students use programming to create a board game. The theme of the board game could be adapted to have students creatively use the social studies content of the Industrial Revolution to show what life was like during the time period. The activity could be used as a summative assessment at the end of the Industrial Revolution Unit in a social studies class or at the end of a programming Unit for a computer skills class. The purpose was to create a lesson that could create personalized learning experience for students while allowing them to participate being creative makers.
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Image Attribution: Enjoy all images on this site! The header images are my own. Images that are not my own will have a caption with the image credit.