MAET​
JOURNEY​
​PROJECT SHOWCASE
This showcase features highlights of my work in the Michigan State University Master's in Educational Technology Program. My showcase is organized into three themes: personalized learning, authentic learning, and creation. Technology integration has the potential to offer personalized learning to students because it opens up a world of resources. The Internet provides students with the opportunity to share their work with the world, solve real world problems, and collaborate outside of the traditional classroom. Technology tools give students and teachers the opportunity to create multi-media projects that teach, tell stories, and express ideas. These three themes were present throughout the MAET program.
​PERSONALIZED LEARNING
Online Learning Course Module
I designed an online course module that provides a blended learning experience to upper elementary students. Blended learning combines face-to-face and online learning experiences. Students are expected to participate and communicate in both settings. Our lives are blended in the sense that we transition between in-person and online interactions with one another: personally and professionally. While designing this course, I took into account TPACK, and UDL, to create a class that is engaging, supportive, personalized, and reflective of current best practice in the online learning environment.
Final Learning Theory
"If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow."
-John Dewey
Learning occurs during expert-novice, teacher-student, parent-child, and peer-peer interactions and results in the learner gaining more knowledge about the world and greater skill to perform. When humans are isolated in extreme ways, their ability to develop, learn, and grow is hindered. Learners need teachers to construct learning experiences that are social, authentic, meaningful, engaging, relevant, and appropriate for the learner’s current level of knowledge and skill.
​
Learning is continuous, and the learner progresses in their knowledge over time. A learner must continually build on prior knowledge. Scaffolding, or building upon prior learning is essential for teachers to consider when developing relevant lessons. What prior experiences and knowledge do my students come to the classroom with? How can I use their prior knowledge to build new knowledge?
​
People learn and grow by giving their time and attention to the observation and practice of a skill. With the help of expert guidance and feedback, learners maintain motivation to take on challenges and solve problems. Teachers guide learning, so misconceptions or mistakes can be identified and corrected, and skills can be perfected. When a competitive gymnast performs a skill, they cannot always tell when they are making a mistake. It takes a skilled coach to point it out and correct the learner.
​
Read the full essay here.
Personalized Learning Through Technology Integration
Personalized Learning through technology has the potential to offer students a tailored educational experience that serves their specific needs and strengths. It consists of four elements: learner profiles, personal learning paths, competency-based progression, and flexible learning environments (Hyslop & Mead, 2012). In “A Path to the Future: Creating Accountability for Personalized Learning”, Hyslop and Mead discuss the benefits of Personalized Learning. Personalized Learning offers a learning experience that will “respond and adapt to support students in achieving their goals”. It allows students to progress based off of their competency, not just their grade level.
Richard Culatta, the Director for the Office of Educational Technology for the United States of America is concerned about the digital divide in America. In his TED talk, he emphasizes that technology in the classroom should not be about digitizing traditional methods of learning. Rather, teachers must reimagine learning through the integration of technology. Technology offers new ways of tracking student learning, providing and organizing data, and personalizing the entire learning process to meet a student’s particular needs.
​
* Read the entire essay here.
AUTHENTIC LEARNING
Wicked Problem Website
​
Wicked problems are complex problems that are difficult or impossible to solve. My group focused on the problem of keeping education relevant, which brings up many questions. What is relevant? What is the purpose of education? Why do schools become irrelevant? Our group of four people collaborated during a Zoom discussion to brainstorm questions to deeply understand our problem, because questioning is an important part of the learning process (Berger, 2014). In this process of analyzing our problem, I created an infographic to provide a visual understanding of its complexity.
​
After coming to a deep understanding of our problem, we began to discuss possible solutions to the problem. We met once again via an online Zoom conversation to pinpoint one or two key solutions that would help address the problem of keeping education relevant.
​
We decided that in order to reimagine learning for students, we must first begin to reimagine training and professional development experiences for educators. This would be our focus for our Multimodal Presentation. All group members collaborated together to create a Wix website that presents our research-based solutions. A summary of the project can be view on my Wordpress blog.
ESSAYS​
Here is a short essay summarizing my take-away from the first three chapters of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. There were two main overarching ideas that rang true to me. One is that students come into new learning experiences with prior knowledge, misconceptions, and histories. As teachers, we must consider these past experiences when we build upon student knowledge. The other idea is that to become an expert learner, students must invest time and effort into organizing and connecting their new and old understandings of the world. You can read my full essay here.
Expert Understanding
Learning in School
and Other Settings
​
Students use prior knowledge to construct new knowledge. With this understanding, I created a collection of lesson plans based off of a school-wide PBIS (Positive Behavior Intervention Supports) system. This final project consisted of three components:
​
Keeping Education Relevant Infographic
I created this infographic using Piktochart to share my thoughts about the importance of authentic (relevant) learning. Please click on the image to the left to view the full infographic.
Real-world Transfer Infographic
The theme of authentic learning continued throughout my coursework in the MAET program. This is an infographic that I created about real-world transfer in art education. I have a specialization in art, and wanted to share the many relevant skills that are taught in the art classroom. Click on the image below to view the full infographic.
CREATION
Remixed Lesson Plan
​
I created a remixed lesson plan, which integrated technology into a lesson in a meaningful and creative way. The role of technology in lessons is not always clear for teachers. SCOT (Social Construction of Technology Theory) says that people give meaning to all types of tools and technologies. The Blabberize site has academic value because I saw a meaningful way of using this tool in the classroom, to share student writing. We must be creative and intentional in the way we overlap content, pedagogy, and technology (TPACK). The technology tools that are available to us offer a great deal of options for creativity and utilization in the classroom, but it is up to the teacher to decide how it will be used.
Vodcast Project
​
​
Vodcasts are a great way to engage students. I also think there is a lot of potential for using vodcasts in a blended learning environment. Video lessons allow teachers to flip the classroom. Students can watch and rewatch a lesson, work on remembering the lesson’s content on their own, before coming to the class to practice higher-level thinking with the support of their teachers and peers. This vodcast video on arrays was created by me.
Maker Education
​
I created this infographic about Maker Education to share my learning about the movement. When students are creators, their learning in meaningful and authentic. They learn to solve problems, collaborate, and revise until they have a creation they are proud of. I think it is important for teachers to model the creation process. I believe teachers must be creators too.
