A little bit about me and my experience
I am from a very small, mostly francophone, city in north-eastern Ontario. I was born and raised here. After completing my Bachelor’s degree in history and bachelor’s degree in Education, I started working as a French and history teacher for the French Catholic school board. Technology has always played a role in my classroom even if this was not the case for most teachers in my school. I saw myself in the description of the “Lone Ranger” described in Nel, Dreyer and Carstens’ article, making choices of technology and media based solely on my experience and intuitions. Five years later, I was hired by CFORP (an enterprise dedicated to developing French resources for teachers in Ontario and across Canada) as an online course designer and developer and later, a project manager. I was very knowledgeable when it came down to teaching strategies and curriculum but LMS was a new tool to learn. Over the next 5 years I worked on designing and developing (but not implementing) over 20 online courses for the Ontario ministry of education. Although I had to comprehend the inner workings of an LMS (for design and development purposes), I never had to actually use the LMS since programmers would import the developed content in the LMS for us. For the past 2 years I’ve been working as a teacher consultant and e-learning contact in my original school board. I play three different roles: I model how to effectively integrate technology in the classroom for K to 12 teachers, I manage our school board’s LMS (D2L/Brightspace) which is provided by the ministry of education and I’m part of the board committee dedicated to renewing our vision and creating a long-term plan that takes into account the changes in education brought by the digital era ( Prensky, 2010).
My Goals for This Course (or perhaps MET)
I will start this section by saying that I love my job because it is a blend of all the things that I like about education: collaboration, learning, teaching and technology. When I applied to the MET program, it was because I wanted to gain more knowledge and competencies that would make me better at my job. I can say that which each course that I take, I can see that I am improving at what I do, I am becoming a better and more knowledgeable leader in my field.
By the end of this course, I would like to present my board with some guidelines and criteria that can help them make more educated choices when it comes to spending large amounts of money of technology for our schools. At present, technology and media are being approved solely by the IT department who don’t have any guidelines to base their decision on (they basically say yes or no to a purchase based on gut feeling or solely on the technical aspects, pedagogy is never part of the equation).
I also want to know more about different LMS and how they compare with one another. I know D2L/Brightspace from top to bottom but am not familiar (except from a student standpoint) with other LMS like Moodle and Connect. A question I often get from teachers is “Why should I use our school board’s LMS instead of [fill with the name of some other technology or LMS name]?” I try to answer the best I can but I am hoping this course can help me better articulate the pros and cons of using and LMS to enhance student learning in K to 12 classrooms.
Social media is a huge debate amongst K to 12 educators. Some say to stay as far away from it as possible as others think that it is an absolute necessity. I am somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. In my opinion, social media is a very important tool that the teacher should comprehend and possibly use as one of many teaching strategies. Social media can allow educators and students to do things that would be otherwise impossible like following an author on Twitter and ask him questions about his novel (and get a response!), collaborating with students from across the province to create an original song (iStudio project in Ontario) and so much more. I realize that there must be some concerns when it comes to social media, the main concern being security and privacy (Bates, 2014). But what if we educate our students about digital citizenship? Does this criterion become less of a concern?
References
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in a digital age. Retrieved from http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
Chickering, A.W., & Ehrmann, S.C., (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 1-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/aticles/sevenprinciples.htm
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers
Nel, C., Dreyer, C., & Carstens, W. A. M. (2010). Educational technologies: A classification and evaluation. Tydskrif vir letterkunde, 35(4), 238-258. Retrieved fromhttp://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/download/53794/42346
Prensky, M. (2010). Teaching digital natives : Partnering for real learning. Thousand Oaks, USA: Corwin.
