This week marks the end of my ETEC 533 journey. I went into the course hoping I would find alternatives and resources for teaching math and science to upper elementary students that would improve my practice. Technology makes a regular appearance in my class and by and large I know my students are exposed to more than most, but I also know there are probably better ways of carrying this out. Actually, there are times when I knew there had to be, especially in the areas of math and science.
Although intense and daunting at times, I have relished the activities and readings I`ve been exposed to in the last three months. This course made me think. It made me analyze, no I think scrutinize would be a better descriptor, my own practice like I never have before. There have been great resources along the way that I have collected and will share with students, but the greatest growth and learning has come from the pedagogical approaches that I have been introduced to and my investigation around how these currently fit with my practice and how they can be interwoven into my future teaching.
I came looking for resources and activities. I am leaving with a stronger sense of pedagogy and who I want to be as a teacher. It’s the latter that will affect the most change and afford more opportunities to use technology, be it new or established resources, to create more authentic and engaging learning opportunities.
From a student’s perspective, I want each of them to be able to:
- be engaged in their learning
- develop useful knowledge they can access in future contexts
- experience authenticity within a learning environment
- have opportunities to make their thinking visible and see the thinking of others as well
- socially construct knowledge and build collective understanding
- share and learn from different perspectives
- participate in generative rather than passive activities
- aggregate data and information to see the strength in collective and collaborative learning
- revise, modify, and apply feedback to continue to refine their understanding and conceptualization
As a teacher, I am more aware of how I can make all of the above happen and how to use technology to enhance the learning experience, demonstrate phenomena that students do not have access to, and carve new paths for understanding concepts individually and collectively. Through this course I have learned the value of:
- abductive reasoning
- mental models
- information visualization
- embracing coupling: informatic participation through technology overlapping in the same space normal as traditional classroom participation
- pedagogically developed social practices to enrich virtual and ‘real’ learning communities
- networked communities and networked learning
- inquiry-based learning through the T-GEM and Learning for Use frameworks and how this fits into my practice
- How People Learn and how the principles of a knowledge, learner, assessment, and community-centered classroom can become cornerstones in the development and sustainability of a culture of learning in my classroom.
Creating the learning environment I want for my students starts with the pedagogical foundation I choose to lay. Pedagogy is never too far from most teachers’ thoughts. But until now, I didn’t fully realize I wasn’t tapping into my own theotetical base as much as I needed to. It’s one thing to understand and contemplate pedagogy in general. It’s another to understand and contemplate it as it applies to your personal practice. This requires a depth of reflection and analysis that prompts you to assess if your ideology matches your actions. Hopefully, they are one in the same. If not, like me, you have some work to do.
For a more detailed synthesis of my learning in ETEC 533, please visit the e-Folio Analysis page.
image: “The real problem is not adding technology to the current organization of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning” by langwitches released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license
The 
Using anchored instruction in the Jasper series, instructional designers sought to create effective learning environments that were knowledge-centered, learner-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered encapsulating the four dimensions of How People Learn. Authentic complex problems became the anchors around which activities and instruction were based helping students connect with a wider community while providing a window into the relevance of math and science outside the classroom. The possibility for multiple solutions also offered students greater perspective on the application of math concepts in the real world, and having access to multiple perspectives in the classroom exposed students to different perceptions among individuals and the collective. The challenges integrated experiential learning, guided learning and active learning promoting increased opportunity for developing “adaptive expertise” rather than limiting students to “routine expertise” which does not require depth of understanding to complete tasks quickly and accurately (Corte, 2007). Teachers were encouraged to further support students increasing flexibility of transfer by exposing them to analog problems designed to stimulate the invention of solutions for recurring problems, consequently enhancing students’ willingness and readiness to take risks with new learning challenges and seek effective solutions.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee developed and launched The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury, which consisted of a series of videos and mathematical problem solving scenarios aimed at middle school students. The videos depict real people in authentic situations that require math reasoning to solve.