EDLD+5364+ePortfolio


 * EDLD 5364 ePortfolio **

__**Week 1**__

I have spent most of my time reading the constructivism literature and theory. I believe that this may be one of the most important aspects of teaching today. It certainly pertains to teaching with technology since technology is such a broad area and there are so many various devices to employ in the classroom. Constructivism is important to me because I always tried to look at each student individually. The majority of my career in education was at a small 1A school. This afforded me the opportunity to have small classrooms and be very familiar with the students. I made sure to make myself fully aware of their environment, both at home and community, and considered these factors in creating lessons and choosing literature and other media to teach. I was not a member of the community in which I taught. In fact, I lived in a much larger city fifty miles away. So my own personal experiences and culture were not as relevant to this group of students. When I used technology and multimedia in the classroom I had to be aware that most of my students didn't have cable and internet services were limited at that time. They also came from a rural background as opposed to my urban education. I would focus on technology and experiences they were familiar with and build upon those ideas. Another aspect that appealed to me was how constructivism recognizes the psychological implications of internalizing ideas and interpreting them within the framework of their own consciousness. While their are many theories of how people learn in psychology, I found that student's perception or interpretation of what I was teaching was always relative to their own lives and environment.

__**Week 2**__ The more I learn about UDL, the more I like the concept. Universal Design for Learners makes sense for many reasons. As a former technology coordinator, the first thing that I thought of while reading the text and watching the videos was budget. Budget is a big stressor in education. Technology coordinators usually have to spend money in various specific areas like special education which would benefit the entire student population. One of the things UDL emphasizes is making the learning environment beneficial for all learners. When the school purchases technology that helps student whit learning disabilities, the technology can be used for many other students. That idea is simple yet brilliant. I thought about how these different types of technology for students who are diagnosed with disabilities could help those who have yet to be diagnosed or have minor learning difficulties that don't necessarily quality as learning disabled. The other aspect is simply slow learners or those who lack the significant motivation for learning in a traditional classroom environment could benefit from technology and adaptions for special learners. One of the videos showed how society makes changes for those that are physically handicapped and I thought about how many of those things have helped me (who is not considered physically disabled). For example, I have at times had an injury or ailment where I use wheelchair ramps. The best way for me to understand the concept is for me to see how I would use as a student. People often joke that everyone is a little ADHD referring to the number of students diagnosed with ADHD. I think there is something to be learned from this "tongue and cheek" assessment of current education which is everyone has some areas of learning challenges. All students can benefit from a more "universal" design that addresses various types of learners and learning styles. The learning designs that are structured specifically for one type of student assume that the student's disability has been correctly defined, the disability is sufficiently studied and understood, and the approach to teaching is effective. These assumptions are huge and don't have the flexibility of a universal design.

__**Week 3**__ This week we were assigned to create a electronic or digital book. All of my teaching experience has been at the secondary level and mostly in the high schools. When I look at teaching strategies I always see them from the perspective of a high school teacher. When I was creating my book, I created the book for a elementary school student. I created a simple one so I could accomplish the task and just learn how to use the electronic book creator. I see how a teacher could make a teaching tool for students to read and learn. But for a high school teacher, this would be great to teach the student how to use. I constantly had my students creating projects and even used projects for major test grades. I liked the students have the flexibility to create a project and explain it. I believed the best way for a student to learn is to have to create and then explain how it came about. The students could have created their own books for a project. When I asked students to do a project I gave them the freedom to express themselves but also gave them a rubric that forced them to learn about the specific areas I wanted them to understand. The book could be collaborative also with each student doing page or part of the book. The electronic book allowed for differentiated instruction also. Teachers could put parameters on the number or pages, length of audio or video depending on the student's capability. As a teacher I just wanted to facilitate learning. I wanted to give the students the tools, teach them how to use it, give them direction and them set them free to explore and create. They usually exceeded my expectations.

__**UDL Lesson**__

I created a UDL lesson for a teaching the student about theme in a common 9th grade novel Ray Bradbury's //Fahrenheit 451//. I have taught this lesson many times in the past but never applied a universal design approach. I have always tried to teach theme in this novel in a way that a multitude of students could understand. With this lesson I used the Strategic Network to allow the students flexibility in explaining their understanding of the literary term theme. This allowed all of the students to listen to others and recall their previous knowledge. I used Recognition Network to emphasize the importance of the understanding what utopia and dystopias are and how the society in Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopia. I also employed the Affective Network by adjusting the level of questions I asked student about their interpretation of how the theme related to the characters in the novel. I asked higher level students more critical questions that required a very high level of connection for the benefit of all of the students. For lower level students, I led and shaped their responses to a accurate interpretation and understanding.

__**Week 4**__ The part of our reading assignment that seems to be most relevant to the experiences that I have had in the class room came from chapter 7 of the Rose and Meyer book. Using UDL to more accurately assess student performance would be a huge undertaking in the educational system that I see here in Texas but would significantly improve student's performance and give a more accurate picture of the student's knowledge. This quote "students' ability or inability to work with particular media and methods may confound evaluation of their knowledge and skills" from chapter 7 of the Rose and Meyer text explains why today there is a big movement to get away from the TAKS test. The unfortunate part of that is the schools are moving to a standardized EOC exam that will probably continue with the same lack of flexibility in assessment. We must test students for the knowledge and skills required for the course (i.e. student's goals) but the method cannot be the same for every student in the state. Teachers told me many times that they knew the student knew the material yet he or she failed that part of the TAKS. The concept that this one examination determines whether a child can graduate or not is ridiculous. There must be assessment and each child cannot get a totally separate one but we have students who have knowledge and skill but are unable to "prove" those skills in the current formal testing arrangements. I think and EOC exam could be one determining factor for a student passing a course but not the only one. I think that the educational system is just afraid of the logistics of totally revamping its entire mode of assessment. The current system is objective and rather easy to handle but allowing for multiple modes of assessment would be daunting given the number of students in Texas. Rose, D. H., & Meyer, A. (2002). Using UDL to Accurately Assess Student Progress. Teaching every student in the Digital Age: universal design for learning (p. 1). Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

__**Week 5**__ "What if" - That is the question posed by the video Vision for Technology in K-12 Education. I chose to write about the video this week because the videos discuss the vision on technology in education. The video discusses the future of education and that is what I feel we need to be addressing. The other day I heard someone say about technology (probably a commercial on TV) that if you are not moving forward then you are going backward. This stuck in my mind, not as just a good example of paradox, but a truth for educational planning. If you are not making decisions and making purchases for your school that consider the future of technology, then you are doing a disservice to your school. As a technology leader, we must be thinking about how technology is being used in the real world and transform the educational environment into a real world environment. I'm not saying that schools much purchase equipment based on fads but based on technology that is here to stay. The classrooms in the video are what I want to see for my own children and I want to see them soon. Children are being exposed to technology from a very young age and are gaining more access to digital information. Technology leaders need to be the catalyst for the evolution of the schools technology by modeling and provide cost effective solutions. In addition, technology leaders need to be providing teachers and administrators with the skills to use the technology in the most efficient way. Learning new technology is often viewed by teachers as more work. Technology leaders should make the staff comfortable with new technology and show them how it should give them less work and more time to teach. The other thing that stuck out in the video was the children doing presentations. I think that the new technology allows the students to create and produce. Teachers should be not only be delivering knowledge but also facilitating learning. I love the idea of students as teachers - students delivering content to other students. This is similar to the old "peer tutor" theory. This video was inspiring and gave me a vision of what I want to see in education.

Youtube.com (nd). //Vision for Technology in K-12 Education//. Retrieved on March 26, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhoOG5Kf1w4

Reflection at a critical level means writing text that reveals your opinion of the reading or experience, why you hold that opinion, how the experience/

assignment/

reading could be improved, how you see the reading or experience as consistent or inconsistent with what you have learned so far, implications for the future, etc. Reflection should include more content than just a recitation of facts and you should document your writing with a minimum of 3 references.

I think that UDL is probably the most important aspect of the class that will have the most impact on my teaching, training, and educational design. The theory of Universal Design for Learners is something that I have reflected upon for teaching and for the training I will conduct in the future. I thought about how I made modification for different types of student but also how I didn't go far enough to make sure everyone got a fair chance to learn their own way and express their mastery of the subject that I taught. A quote from the Rose and Meyer book "Most current assessments are not designed to accommodate individual differences. Generally, educators have interpreted "fairness" to mean that assessments are uniform in format and administered in a standardized fashion - the same test is given in exactly the same way and under the same conditions for each learner. In some situations, and for some purposes, standardized administration is indeed appropriate, particularly if the format and circumstance of the test exactly match the requirements of a future task" This had a big impact of my thinking about student's success. I believe that students need to have success to want to continue to achieve and learn and if teachers are not giving them a chance to succeed through various methods of assessment, then we are setting them up for failure.

The other major teaching tools that I learned from were the Web 2.0 tools. I think that class put them into action while we were reading and learning about them. While we read about the significance of collaboration, we were assigned collaboration on our wikis and website. This is absolutely the best way to learn. I had some experience with Web 2.0 tools while others in my group didn't have any experience so I was able to understand frustrations with the tools and techniques for helping people understand. Our group learned the most effective methods of collaboration and each one of us came up with ideas for different types of collaboration that we could share with teachers. A statement form the Bransford and Cocking text "An important use of technology is its capacity to create new opportunities for curriculum and instruction by bringing real-world problems into the classroom for students to explore and solve;" explains how we, as students of this course, learned. We had a "real-world" assignment and we had to use technology because we don't all live near each other. When most of us experienced this new technology, we were amazed at how useful it was and why young people naturally gravitate toward this new media. Another quote, also from the Bransford text, “The challenge for education is to design technologies for learning that draw both from knowledge about human cognition and from practical applications of how technology can facilitate complex tasks in the workplace” references this class and how I should use my experience completing the tasks (which some were complex) in our assignment to think about designing classes that not only teach new concepts but allow the students to use the knowledge to create and solve problems.

Rose, D. H., & Meyer, A. (2002). Using UDL to Accurately Assess Student Progress. Teaching every student in the Digital Age: universal design for learning (p. 1). Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Bransford, J., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (1999). How people learn brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press :.