An annotated transcript of my Master of Arts in Educational Technology coursework:
CEP 800 Learning in School and Other Settings Instructors: Diana Campbell, Carmen Richardson, Dr. Cary Roseth. Summer 2016 In this course we examined various theories of, and related to, learning and teaching. These included behaviorism, observational learning, schemata theory, zone of proximal development, and so on. We looked at how individual and environmental differences can influence learning. We also studied habit development and change, and engaged in a project in which we cooperated to each change some habit of our own. I took away from this course a deeper theoretical understanding of learning and teaching, a more developed personal philosophy of both, and an ability to stop myself snacking in the evenings.
CEP 807 Proseminar in Educational Technology Instructors: Aric Gaunt, Spencer Greenhalgh, Dr. Matthew Koehler. Fall 2016 This course is the capstone for the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET). It is a course in which we work cooperatively in virtual houses to critically reexamine our learning over the course of the program and to create an online portfolio of our work. I am in the process of creating this portfolio website which includes a selected showcase of my work for my courses, critical reflections on the process and my progress, and a professional profile outlining the work and formal and informal education experiences that have shaped who I am now as an educator. This site is the major artifact I will be left with from this course, but the true project is in the examination and curation of what I have been learning and producing.
CEP 810 Teaching for Understanding with Technology Instructors: Nancy Ayers, Jodi Spicer. Spring 2012 The first course I took in the Educational Technology program, CEP 810 was also the first for-credit online course I had ever taken, and coincided with a time of major transition in my working life. In this course we developed personal growth plans. Then we learned about personal learning networks (PLNs) and how digital resources such as RSS feeds or social networking sites (SNS) can be part of these. We also analyzed and further developed our individual PLNs, then created and shared visual representations of them. I took away a better understanding of how to manage my own learning and became an active user of Twitter and Facebook.
CEP 811 Adapting Innovative Technologies in Education Instructors: Sara Beauchamp Hicks, Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf. Spring 2013 The second course in the program was CEP 811, and in it we learned about ways to actually implement technology in our educational practice. We were introduced to resources for teachers, such as the MERLOT website, and were encouraged to develop and share our own teaching materials there. We also studied principles such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and considered how to leverage technology to apply the principles to our own teaching. We learned about the WebQuest model, found and evaluated existing WebQuests, and also created our own. This course led to me developing a couple of WebQuests which I used in my courses repeatedly after that and even shared with other instructors. Not only that, it provided me with skills and examples that led to me giving multiple presentations and workshops on WebQuests.
CEP 812 Applying Educational Technology to Issues of Practice Instructors: Bill Marsland, Dr. Michelle Schira Hagerman. Spring 2014 This was the third course that I completed in the program, which also marked my completion of the Certificate in Educational Technology. Similar to the above noted CEP 800, this course included an examination of our teaching and learning philosophies and their connection to technology. We also considered how teaching and learning could be re-imagined with technology. We engaged in a major group project in which my group learned about and practiced project-based learning (PBL), similar to what in language teaching circles is referred to as task-based learning. We created an online presentation and a white-paper advocating for the implementation of PBL to better serve learners.
CEP 815 Technology and Leadership Instructors: Benjamin Gleason, Missy Cosby, Dr. Aman Yadav. Spring 2016 During this class we examined the intersection of leadership, education, and technology. We delved into how technology can and should promote learning, how it may not be able to help, how it has been misused, and scrutinized misguided or poorly promoted technology implementation. We also learned about what leadership means, examined various styles of leadership, and learned how to develop leadership skills. There were good ideas for managing work flow, delegating appropriately, and creating grounded vision as a leader. We looked at ways our networks, both virtual and face-to-face, can help us build and spread a shared vision, and help us lead change. We created individual vision statements about some element of our professional practice, and another artefact I took away from this course was a plan for a professional development course a classmate and I developed that would include introductions to the TPACK and SAMR models of technology integration in education, the concept of PLNs for helping manage one’s own technology adoption, and practice with doing so.
CEP 822 Approaches to Educational Research Instructors: Daniel Freer, Ha Nguyen, Dr. E. David Wong. Summer 2015 This course focused on what research is, what researchers do, some strengths and weaknesses of different models of research, and the unique challenges facing educational researchers. These latter include ethical issues related to using human subjects, political and community values that can both drive research and leverage it, and how the general primacy in academia of certain types of research can disadvantage educational research. We learned to examine both secondary and primary research reports, and the importance of doing our own critical examinations of the latter. We practiced this skill on papers related to our own fields and interests and produced and shared short reviews. This included learning to, or improving our ability to, understand statistical data presented in these reports. I walked away with a better understanding of all these aspects of research, both from a consumer and a producer’s standpoint.
CEP 891 Special Topic: Teaching Languages with Technology Instructors: Dr. Chin-Hsi Lin, Dr. Ruhui Ni. Spring 2014 I was lucky enough to be able to take this course offered with a very direct connection to my own teaching context. Most of the students in my other classes in the MAET program were primary and secondary school classroom teachers and few of them were teaching language, so the foci and discussions were often removed from my day-to-day practice. However, this course connected very directly to my tertiary-level, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. We were introduced to the development of technology in language teaching and critically examined several concrete examples of its use. Our examination also included reading research articles related to this use, and then we each created our own research proposal. Mine led to a small project and, to this point, one short published article.
FLT 808 Assessment for Foreign Language Teaching Instructor: Aaron Ohlrogge. Summer 2016 Assessment for FLT was offered by the Foreign Language Teaching Department and I chose it in lieu of a CEP course about online assessment. While I had taken a course called Language Testing during my Applied Linguistics MA studies several years ago, I felt that this course would help refresh and expand on my knowledge as well as be directly applicable to my current position. While the basic principles of testing were the same, this course exposed me to more recent ideas and developments in language testing, and significantly reinforced both my understanding of principles and my use of techniques for appropriate assessment. I also developed a summative assessment instrument which I can use in a course I am currently teaching.
FLT 881 Teaching Foreign Language with Technology Instructor: Dr. Dustin De Felice. Fall 2015 This was another course offered by the Foreign Language Teaching Department. While the title is similar to the one for CEP 891, the approach and content were quite different. We did read and critically react to some research articles in this course. However, the resources we were introduced to for teaching were quite different from those in the other course. Also, we each had to design and implement lesson plans in which we used technology to solve an instructional problem or improve our practice in a specific way and then report on them. We also had to design an ideal classroom space incorporating technology, and soon after creating this design I presented at a conference in Singapore where I was surprised to find myself in a room with many of the elements of my design. Another project for this class was a persuasive paper, a version of which is currently under review for publication.
Photos on this site by T. E. Bieri & A. Kanda. Not for use without permission.