Flight Path and detours…

As an avid traveller, I have been fortunate enough to be able to travel to several different continents with my longest flight time being a combined 23 hours in the air, therefore the Flight Plan analogy really appealed to me. I often plan my trips in detail by researching for months in advance of the trip filling a notebook full of helpful tips, unique activities and of course, the best local restaurants. Therefore when I began my journey through the MET program, I imagined that my flight would be a relatively smooth, easy trip from being a confident digital tourist to an advanced technology guide capable of utilizing the latest and best educational applications in my classroom. However, to my surprise, my plane was diverted to other places along the way.

My name is Mimi Ross, and I have been a Grade 6/7 teacher at an IB PYP school in West Vancouver, BC for the past 10 years. Our school has been able to offer one to one technology for our students from grade 4-7 for the past 5 years, and our school district invests a lot of time and funding in order to ensure the students have access to the latest in technology from coding programs to 3D printers. It seemed a natural choice for me to choose the MET program in order to stay on top of the technological advances being introduced by our district. My initial learning goals were to learn how leverage these new technologies to increase student engagement and to allow students to be able to develop their own technological abilities to deepen their inquiry skills. I am embarrassed to admit to what seems to be a rather shallow rationale. Like a good traveller, I had my MET flight path planned out to meet my goals. However, after taking ETEC 531, my flight plan was revised to from the how to use the technology to why to use the technology. A truly enlightening and rejuvenating stop-over after a fairly uneventful few core classes which made for a dull first part of my trip.

The old adage of “When you know better, you do better” clearly applies for me in this course as I feel that it will blend both the how and why of this journey. My goals for this course are to utilize research such as the SECTIONS model in order to understand and learn how to choose, design and implement a LMS for different student learning styles that promotes student engagement while developing collaborative skills and allows for authentic assessment with prompt feedback .

A few questions of focus for me would be:

• S:  What prior approaches to learning are the students likely to bring to your program? How suitable are such prior approaches to learning likely to be to the way you need to teach the course? How could technology be used to cater for student differences in learning?
• E:  How intuitively easy to use, both by students and by yourself, is the technology you are considering?
• T: What are the unique pedagogical characteristics of different media? How might different media help with the presentation of content and development of student skills in this course?
• I: In terms of the skills I am trying to develop, what kinds of interaction will be most useful? What media or technology could I use to facilitate that kind of interaction?
• O: Are there already suitable media resources freely available that I can use in my teaching, rather than creating everything from scratch?

It feels like my flight path has led me to the perfect stop-over to that will help to reinforce my understanding of the why and give me to tools to make the how happen. I am really excited to be on the same flight with you. Who has the peanuts and pretzels mix?

Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/