fletcher | #UWinDig

Feb 21 2019

Technologist taking tech on as a Teacher

Going through the role of the technologist on the eCampus modules proved to be an eye opening experience with it showing me how much that is taken for granted as an educator who was raised into a technology the skills that I employ naturally, but a majority of teachers would not. There is a natural effort throughout our lesson planning to integrate technology into the classroom so that it is relevant to the audience, therefore aligning it with curriculum. However, the one concept that I found that I commonly skip or overlook is the prototype stage, where I learned that I tend to just risk it but not form a controlled risk or have a segmented release of the tool. This made me self reflective of the tools that I do use in my lessons and it made me realize that there is many different tools that I use but they fit the same mold . That mold is traditional education through quizzes or testing of knowledge, such as kahoot or mentimeter. This made me critically reflect on the fact that I may use technology in the classroom but it might not be fully addressing the challenges of the learners which is the end goal for integrating technology. I understand that there may be a use of technology in the classroom but it may not be effective. The role of the technologist has so many steps and subtle nuances to ensure that when you as an educator employ differentiated instruction that it not only understands the class problems but properly addresses them. Furthermore, we always learn about student centered learning as a core concept to most teacher pedagogues, however I learned that you need to select the tool for the student not the technological tool that the teacher enjoys. The overall module for technologist was effective because it mirrored what it sought to enforce by providing multimodal education with it having facets that appealed to multiple different types of intelligence by utilizing textual, visual, auditory, and linguistic elements to reach the audience. this is effective while at the end it models further strong educational skills by emphasizing the value of feedback to improve its modules, while recognizing the fact the facing constructive criticism is one of the hardest parts of integrating a new tool into the classroom. This module had a far greater depth than I had anticipated which is the reasoning for why I chose to do an Infographic because there was far too much information to express with a more visually driven platform such as Powtoon.

Tagged #ontarioextend, #UWinDig

Oct 30 2018

2 Comments

332wednesday12

The Hunt for Digital Redlining October

The article Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy by Chris Gilliard proved to a piece that pushed the idea of access to information at the post-secondary level.

This article was a well-done piece that provides the origins of the word redlining and why it is critical to understand this concept to grasp the overall discussion of the article. Through student experience, there is a deep insight into this idea because of our greater access to information than the average citizen. This relevant because the modern student is a digital native and therefore fluent in the access information, but this proves problematic through limiting their access to knowledge. This plays a critical role within the modern digital academic landscape because there is large contention with freedom of speech and freedom of information being presented as a major issue on campuses. This is ironic because schools will not acknowledge digital redlining as a problem however they will acknowledge the limiting of speech and information as a forefront problem in post-secondary education. The irony continues because the article states that there are students who are paying to expand their knowledge but are attending institutions that limit the information they have and therefore becoming counter-intuitive with community colleges being at the forefront of this.

Being in the role of an educator this proves problematic because those students in a secondary school are just starting to learn academic digital literacy. If they go to schools that will limit this or digital reline them then this stunts their digital literary growth and causes these individuals to not only get a limited education but be misled into thinking that community colleges are wells of knowledge that train them for the future.

_Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy

https://www.powtoon.com/c/bmXdWPt8k37/1/m

Oct 02 2018

3 Comments

332wednesday12

Ain’t Afraid of No Digital Ghosts

Technology is a center point to society today and is fundamental to how it functions. With deep-rooted ties to society, it permeates into education. The permeation can prove to be finicky because of improper applications of these external societal resources not fully being useful for students. It is the equivalency of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. In the article, Digital Ghosts in the Modern Classroom by Ashley Hinck there is the argument for teachers to recognize through their use of technology in their pedagogy the dangers of using templated work. The article is a strong piece that acknowledges that students will not always know the ins and outs of coding and have the skills necessary to maximize their technology and creativity at the same time. There is the concept that Hinck argues that teachers in their pedagogy need to realize how to limit the conformity of templates, yet maximizing the creative results. This concept resonated with me because templates are the foundations to most interactive learning because it allows for that individualized student-centered contributions, yet those same templates are argued to build conformity which is detrimental to this teaching philosophy. Hinck I may not fully agree with for some of their ideas, but they presented information that forces teachers to be leary on the usage of templates within the classroom. This connects directly with the fact that my template has proven limited in how I can manipulate the photos and what I can do with the structure. Hinck argued that there are limitations on templates and this is echoed throughout the process of creating my artifact. On the other side, however, the effort and time that would need to be put in to create the infographic through coding it would have been far more problematic. There would have been issues if even one line of code was off and therefore the amount of trial and error that would take place would bog down the creative ideas. It would force the creator to weigh whether it would have been worth it to add certain information and I would have limited the construction of my infographic if I had to use something like CSS. I found that through my experience of creating this infographic that I had to reflect on tools that I have used in the past. As explained in the infographic there are concerns with Kahoot because they are only tapping into the remember and maybe the understanding levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy which is not where an educator wants to reach for a template based learning tool. From there this made me think about where it falls on the SAMR model and that it was only a substitution form. The Hinck article made me critically reflect on what resources that I have in my tech teaching toolbox and showing me that it was lacking.