Final Reflection on Educational Technology

Final Reflection on Educational Technology

This course has been a grand tour of the ideas informing the use of technology in education.  I have encountered a multi-dimensional landscape of philosophies, practices and modes of evaluation that defy simple explanation. The entry-level notion of Chromebooks, web pages and Power Point presentations as the central necessities of improving education is as simplistic as saying that World Population can be solved by contraception or that our nations problems can be solved by gutting one small segment of discretionary spending.  There are too many nuances to talk about all of them, but I will try to give a tour of the ideas that I found most fundamental to the knowledge that I have gained from this course.  

I appreciated Bruner's Folk Pedagogy idea as a starting point.  It is important in any endeavor to examine one's beliefs on a topic, especially those that may be hidden from our conscious consideration.   Our preconceived notions of "what children's minds are like and how to help them learn," is built in to each of our interactions with children and young people.  The closer we plumb these for meaning, the more we can learn about what is actually going on in their learning process.  We must examine not only what we think about their process and abilities, but what they think about their abilities before we decide how to approach their education.  I feel that this was a theme that we hit over and over again in this course, whether directly or implicitly.  

Another important foundation of this course can be summed up by the work of Cope and Kalantzis as far as the nature of what they call the "New Media."  Their work gets at the important changes in media technology, as well as the landscape within which it is used.  The situation that exists today is not that of the top-down didactic lecture approach of the last century, where different modes of education--written, seen, heard--have been cobbled together awkwardly and presented as the "thing to be learned" by more-or-less passive students.  Instead, we see what the authors refer to as Agency (on the part of students), Divergence (from imposed norms), Multimodality (seamless multiplicity of modes of expression) and Conceptualization (the ability to learn a new level of knowledge representation according to this scheme).  As a result, students become Designers in charge of their own path on some level, including the task of fitting and pacing learning to their own learner needs, as well as mastering the many modes of expression that are in use today.  Finally, the authors note the necessary change in our own pedagogical style necessitated by these new paradigms. We cannot lecture to the new paradigm because they are not built for that anymore.

Finally, I think the Wendy Drexler material captures something about how this course all fits together. In the case of the application of technology, SAMR and other philosophies of the application of technology, technology must be transformative, not just a newer way to do drill-and-kill.    Her student's video of her Personalized Learning Environment was an inspiration to me as a science teacher.  I look forward to being able to have all of my students that involved in their education, reveling in the freedom that technology provides for multi-directionality, self-monitoring and finding ways to accomplish their educational goals.  

I will say, though, that her actual article makes a point of caution that has occurred to me both in my studies for this course and in my own implementation of technology and new educational paradigms.  She points out both the awesome power of her "Networked Student" model, and the drawbacks that may be experienced by some users.  In her words: 

 No longer is there a smooth, charted path that defines what must be done to get an “A”. Traditional, lecture-based classrooms are designed as passive learning environments in which the teacher conveys knowledge and the student responds (Chen, 2009). Imagine the potential frustration that self-regulated learning holds for students who are quite comfortably accustomed to specific teacher directions with finite expectations.

We may have a big new world for them to discover, but many of our students are still waiting for "Reading Rainbow" to come on and paint the picture in front of them instead of learning to paint their own with the new tools that they have been given.  

Honestly, there is so much more that has affected me--the study of Connectivism was brand new for me, the trip through instructional design and the implementation and evaluation of its success, Robert's interesting presentation on his flavor of the Agile Process, as well as the many, many wonderful ideas from my peers that I saw last Saturday.  What fun!

At any rate, I must say that I have enjoyed what I learned in this course.Our residencies were pleasant and fulfilling ways to engage with the ideas, and I feel like we had a remarkable class dynamic.  I feel ready for, and am excited about, the next steps in my coursework--Instructional Design and perhaps  Advanced Topics in this area (What's the Meta-for?).  Very enjoyable.  Thank you.

Ed Tech Pesonal Timeline

My first memory of using technology to do any sort of math was Apple II's "Lemonade Stand"

Of course, this was a fun game when you only had 48K of memory to burn, and it certainly taught the value of careful planning, but it wasn't really educational (maybe it was too fun to let us use in class in the early 80's).

My real first introduction to ed tech in school was to drill and kill math problems.  My teacher would call me in for "extra help" and sit me in front of an Apple II+ (64K--moving up!!!).  I remember pushing through a bunch of math problems and whenever I was stuck, the computer would tell me to "keep trying!" and other (not very) helpful prompts.

For the 1980's, that was about it.  I took a computer science course in high school that met once or twice per week, where they would teach us BASIC programming.  The highlights of our work for me were to get the screen to produce the verse lyric to "Time of the Season" by the Zombies (What's your name....who's your Daddy," etc with perfect timing--not as easy as you might think--and to reproduce the first screen from Donkey Kong  in line-for-line detail.

Now, this was useful and fun in that it taught me about computational thinking, which I wish I had been given more teaching about, as it really is a valuable skill that I cannot believe is not written into our State Standards.  Maybe in the next ten years we will begin teaching this most important skill of the last thirty years in our classrooms.  That thirty-year delay seems about right (irony noted?).

Second stage, in my work as a teacher, I have frequently used technology to enhance the learning of my students.  I have always been about them using technology to do things that they haven't been able to do before.  I was never that interested in Power Points instead of Poster Projects.  I have been more about using probeware in my classrooms to collect data, and excel to visualize it.  These are powerful, 21st-century applications that I had used in my own experiences in a real genetics laboratory.  

Also, I have been drawn to video.  Teaching kids to speak visually is an incredibly important skill, and the potential for new types of projects and expression is enormous.  I have always thought that the process of planning a truly original media project is very challenging for students, and I have been shocked to find out how few of them are able to either make animations like in Scratch programming, or to produce and edit original video content.  

My culminating project for my Environmental Science course is a video project called Project Atlantic, in which students are required to research an energy topic, interview community members and produce a film with music, proper transitions, etc, and present it to the public.  They have to collect data, come up with a storyboard and decide how to make it all come to life.  Here is a sample:

Project Atlantic Introduction Clip

I am convinced that this is what people are talking about when they use the "R" in SAMR.  This was not possible before this technology was available--Chromebooks, Flip Cameras, WeVideo, etc.

As for the future, I see so many possibilities.  The emergence of virtual worlds will allow students to me immersed in moments of history, to participate in distant gatherings and discussions as avatars, and to rapidly assimilate new information as changes take place.  

Another, simpler but also desirable outcome is that I picture a world where schools can actually become self-paced learning centers rather than top-down lecture halls.  Students are pre-assessed and then placed into modular systems that effectively teach and test skills.  This frees teachers to help with what students do not understand, rather than having to "stand and deliver" to disinterested crowds who are taking in ten to twenty percent of what they are exposed to.  In this way, students can learn at a pace that suits them, and pursue 'meatspace' experiences that enhance and expand on their learning.  Ultimately, this is the only way that our current proficiency-based learning requirements can be met.

Here's hoping!