#UWinDig

As educators in the 21^st Century, finding ways to integrate technology into our classrooms, teaching practices, and assessment methods is imperative. And lucky enough, eCampus Ontario and Extend are making the process of learn how to integrate technology extremely easy and extremely affordable (a.k.a FREE) for educators. One of the modules found on the website is entitled Technologist and provides the scenario of a teacher teaching the same course in the same way each and every year and they want to learn how to incorporate technology to benefit all learners within their classroom. This module starts with an overview of what is to be learned and then moves into two critical components: defining digital literacy and the design-thinking model.

There are many different definitions of digital literacy, which all encompass the same general theme: digital literacy is one’s ability to find, understand, curate, and create within an online context or platform along with the skills to behave appropriately while online. Before one can even begin to implement technology into their teaching practice, they need to ensure that their students are digitally literate and responsible. Once these basic, fundamental skills have been put into place and practiced, an educator can easily integrate technology into their pedagogy by following the five steps outlined in the design-thinking model.

Design-thinking is a human-centred approach to teaching and learning that believes the people will benefit from the solution or product if they are actively and directly involved in its design. From an educator’s perspective, this particular approach is helpful because it allows the learner to become involved in their own learning and find solutions collaboratively with others. The design-thinking process follows five simple steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and connect. An educator begins by emphasizing with their students and defining a challenge they may be facing. Next, an educator would brainstorm and develop ways to tackle these learning challenges with the use of technology integration. Once an idea has been developed, the educator works with the learners to create a prototype using the desired technology. Lastly, the educator determines how this technological integration can be successfully integrated into their specified curriculum. Attached below is a YouTube video from the Technologist module that outlines what design-thinking is. Take a look!

Coming from a science background, I immediately think about the process of inquiry-based learning and how design-thinking may actually be a connection to this type of learning, simply through the technological lens as opposed to a scientific, laboratory perspective. Imagine what would happen in the world of science education if all science educators incorporated both inquiry-based learning AND design-thinking into majority of their lessons?! Our students would be developing research and construction skills far beyond what they could ever believe was possible and at a much faster rate. I believe that the incorporation of the design-thinking approach could streamline the process of technological integration for some educators having a difficult time doing so on their own. Once they are comfortable in this process, they can begin to look for connections between the design-thinking process and their own curriculums (i.e., inquiry-based learning in the science curriculum) and bring those connections together in a way that is most beneficial to their students.

The multimedia platform that I decided to use to create this infographic was Canva and I absolutely LOVED IT! I was interested to try this platform because I wanted to compare it to Piktochart, the platform I used to create my last multimedia reflection piece. Looking back at the creative process for both multimedia assignments, I found Canva to be easier to navigate and was easier to collect all of the information in one place than Piktochart. When using Piktochart, you have to add panels to increase the amount of space on your infographic, which is more than fine until it comes time to uploading your work onto the blog. Canva has many template options to get you started but allows for complete creativity once a template has been selected. Canva allows the creator to select font types, font sizes, font colours, graphic colours, text placements, text sizes, and graphic sizes. Now understanding how easy and pain free Canva is to use, I am much more comfortable bringing this software into my next placement and incorporating this platform into a future lesson. #TEAMCANVA

Now, lets say you found this article so intriguing that you went to eCampus Ontario yourself to get started on this Technologist module, but there are just so many words and not enough time in your day. HAVE NO FEAR! MY INFOGRAPHIC IS HERE!

We live in a world where finding resources like pencils, paper, overhead projectors and books in a classroom is almost obsolete. Digital technologies have taken over our education system and is calling for the changing of mindsets, especially from schools, teachers, learners and forms of assessment. In an article entitled “Teaching In A Participatory Digital World” by Dr. Michele Jacobsen, she begins to discuss the importance of incorporating and encouraging digital participation within our education systems, particularly in the classroom.

For this reflection I decided to use Piktochart to create an infographic summarizing and discussing Jacobsen’s article. Although there were many restrictions within the application that could only be accessed by paying for the premium version, there are still many ways to create and personalize the infographic. I really enjoyed that the background colour/image could be changed for each panel. Personally, I enjoy when all of my visuals are uniform throughout a project so I decided to go with the same background for each panel of this project. However, the option is there if you want to alter the background of any panel. It was very easy to navigate through the application, change text size and colour, add images and move things around. I would highly recommend Piktochart to anyone thinking of making an infographic for their multimedia reflection.

Throughout the article I got a strong sense of relationship and connection between teacher and student, especially in the digital world using Web 2.0 applications. It has been discussed many times, in many classes, how important reflection of practice is in the teaching profession. What this article touched on, that I never really thought about, was also how important reflection of student work and process is as well and how this student reflection impacts and effects the teachers reflection. A teacher must perform a reflective practice on their lesson, technology use in their lesson, was the use of technology effective for the purpose of the lesson and many other things. The teacher should also ask the students to perform a reflection on their work and their practice and this reflection should impact how the teacher reviews their lesson. Thus, a cyclical process between teacher reflection impacting students and students reflection impacting teachers. I had never made this connection, or realized the importance of this connection, until I read the Jacobson article and now I strongly believe it is something that each and every educator should make a part of their teaching practice.

This article also got me thinking of how I can make sure I am encouraging participatory learning within my own classroom, but also how I can ensure this is also being encouraged within my school, my school board and on a larger scale (i.e., schools within the province and with the Ministers of Education). With mental health issues becoming more prevalent, especially in secondary schools, there are more and more students having a harder time participating in class discussions due to things like anxiety. However, these students that may struggle with verbal communication can participate in online forums and discussions without any difficulties. By incorporating online discussions, whether it is through a blog or discussion board, a teacher can make these specific students still feel like they are a part of the class and contributing positively to the lesson. Including more digital technology and digital participatory activities in the classroom through various Web 2.0 applications allows the teacher to create a more inclusive classroom environment as well as producing forms of assessment and activities that target various students in the class with various learning preferences. Connecting this topic back to encouraging digital participatory learning outside of my own class, it makes me question how I can step into a new role of advocacy for this type of learning and what steps I can take to allow myself to take on this role of advocacy throughout my school board and the entire province as well. These may seem like big dreams but if there isn’t small people like me thinking of making these differences, quite frankly, I am not sure if they will every come to fruition.

Overall, I agree with many of the ideas put forth by Jacobsen in this article, but it does lead me to some questions. For example, not all schools have the same funds allocated towards technology availability to students. So, if you are teaching at a school like this, perhaps incorporating digital participatory learning may be difficult for a given class. Are there ways that we can get around this through things like trips to the public library, or online demonstrations only made by the teacher? But if we do that, the digital technology is no longer used for participatory purposes. Additionally, there may be a class that does not respond as positively to this method of teaching and learning. In this case, a teacher may need to alter the way they incorporate participatory technology into their classroom.

Well, those are my thoughts! Enjoy my infographic!

-Faith Hudvagner

P.S Because my infographic is so large, when I put the image in directly it is too small to be even legible. I have attached the link to this image to bring you to view it on the web. Hopefully this is easier for you! Darn technology, making our lives easier and more difficult all at the same time! Oh well, Enjoy!

Guess What! Students are not taking full advantage of technology and are actually hindering themselves from evolving as learners and more specifically content creators. The more surprising part comes from the fact that teachers may be actually encouraging this to happen, without even realizing it! In order for students to be using technology to its full potential as an aid to help them reach their full potential, they need to shy away from pre-constructed templates and move into programs that allow them to be active content generators. As teachers, we need to be sure we are fostering our students creativity and encouraging them to play an active role in their own creative processes.

Below is a Powtoon I have created reflecting on Ashley Hinck’s article published in Hybrid Pedagogy entitled “Digital Ghosts In The Modern Classroom“. I had a really fun time using Powtoon as a form of multimedia technology, until it told me that my video couldn’t be longer than 3 minutes long. In Powtoon’s public documentation it says that animations created on their free platform can be up to 5 minutes, however this was not the case. That is why I have attached two videos, a part 1 and a part 2. Aside from this minor bump in the road while using this program I found Powtoon easy to navigate and use. There are many different formats, fonts, colours and characters available for creative expression and importing music/voice recording was simple (as long as your file was in an mp3 format that is). Overall, I would recommend using Powtoon to anyone that is willing to put in time to create an animation essentially from scratch.

I hope you enjoy my two-part animation summarizing Hinck’s article and my thoughts and reflections on the content.

Keep being content creators everyone!

– Faith Hudvagner