Hello, my name is Patrick Conlan and I am from California. While I have done just a tad bit of teaching before, I wouldn’t classify myself as a teacher at all. Instead, I would call myself the technology guy. My undergraduate degree is in physics and computer science, so I have a knack for technical things. I started my career working in IT at a University doing Mac computer support for the science & multimedia departments. That is how I got myself into the area of educational technology. Eventually I moved on and got a position as a Directory of Academic Technology at a high school which opened me up to a lot more types of learning technologies and way more responsibilities. While working at the high school, I completed a masters degree in multimedia. I have always been very interested in movies, games, and interactive storytelling, so it was a great experience to go through. When I moved up to Vancouver, Canada, I decided to try my hand working in video and multimedia. I’ve worked as a Media Specialist and am currently working as a Video Producer in the network technology industry. I have had a weird and round-about career/education path but it is finally starting to form into something that I see as having a lot of potential. Ideally I would love to find a school that needs someone like me who has not only the strong technical background but someone who understands what it is like to create media and use technology in a classroom. My hope is that the MET degree will help me get access to those opportunities some day.
As mentioned above, my experience is fairly broad in a lot of ways. Fortunately, working at the high school gave me access to a number of great technologies to play with. Initially I was tasked with the responsibility of converting over our old student information system to an entirely new platform. This also included setting up and transitioning approximately 75 teachers to online gradebooks. It was a neat time at the school because there was so much change on the technology front that everyone just kind of gave up resisting and went with it. So beyond the student information system and online grades, I also spearheaded a full campus rollout of student email accounts and collaborative tools via Google Apps, a teacher laptop program, a Moodle installation for self directed and blended learning, integration of multimedia equipment into the curriculums, online course assignment schedules, interactive clickers, online surveys, and video and animation courses. Needless to say, it was a busy few years.
I feel confident in saying that I have strong grasp on how to implement and support technology in a school environment. Although one can always learn more and I felt that my lack of experience was in the area of curriculum design with technology and how learners use technology in meaningful ways. Since I am a tech person, I will always be curious about the new tools that pop up and how we can use them in new and interesting ways. My overall goals for both the MET program and 565A is to be exposed to tools that I have not had the opportunity to use before, to learn about what makes a piece of technology useful for learning, to explore the concepts of distance learning, to contemplate what the future of learning environments is going to look like, and how to design learning technologies. As per specific tangible goals that I am looking to meet throughout this course and in the near future in this program, these include:
- Building course content in an LMS
- Become more familiar with the new LMS alternatives
- How to leverage social media as a teaching tool
- Discovering new learning tools
- Understanding the best uses of assessments within varying technologies
- Whether or not mobile learning is more meaningful than traditional environments