Proposed Flight Plan:
“An intelligent plan is the first step to success. The man who plans knows where he is going, knows what progress he is making and has a pretty good idea when he will arrive.”
– Basil S. Walsh
My name is Kevin Andrews and I live in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This is my very first MET course.
Currently, I teach grade 7 technology education at an intermediate school of 900 students along with serving as network administrator. On a regular day I can be found running around between classes fixing computers, restoring deleted files, running network wires, taking photos for the yearbook, and updating the school’s website and twitter/flickr feeds.
Over the past 12 years in teaching I’ve had the opportunity to work with and assist teachers, school administrators, and district personnel with their technology plans to help further implement technology in the classroom. My most recent experience (last 2 years) has been helping to incorporate a class set of iPads and wireless netbooks into our school by providing teacher in-services to help everyone feel more comfortable using this new technology so they can confidently integrate it into their class instruction.
In my experience, students are easily motivated when technology is seamlessly integrated into instruction and teachers are more willing to embrace technology when they are comfortable using it. This has been a mantra of mine for many years and so getting an MET from UBC was the next logical progression to help further my learning.
The University of British Columbia MET graduate-level program compliments my focus towards improving my education in the area of educational technology. Unlike most others, this institution supports a rich online environment where students are challenged to develop their goals within an active cross-cultural learning community . It is my intention to develop my skills as a technology educator and having the ability to study and participate online with MET curriculum specialists, students, and professors will only enhance my need to further my knowledge in technology supported learning environments. As a current educator, one of my goals is to develop an effective and interactive learning environment for students and teachers but finding ways to extend this type of learning has been challenging.
My intention and primary reason for taking the ETEC 565A course is to gain critical experience in the design and development of Learning Management Systems, social software, and multimedia so I may have the ability to supplement my teaching curriculum with rich interactive software, online blogging expertise, and knowledge of how to design and develop a complete Moodle course site. Having the experience, knowledge, and ability to develop a LMS like Moodle will enable my school the ability take the classroom online. Students will have the unique ability to do quizzes online, upload images, videos, and audio reports, embed encyclopedia pages, add twitter streams and Flickr slideshows, share their Glogster poster, create location based learning scenarios with mobile tagging or GPS locking, and many more options as I begin to learn and explore the course content. In Module 1 of the course I look to get inspired by Bates and Poole’s writings on ‘Framework for Selecting and Using Technology”, as they map out their SECTIONS framework providing critical background knowledge on how to design a usable model for selecting and using technology in my school and classroom. I look forward to learning more about becoming an effective technology teacher by studying the ‘NETS-S’ model discovering how facilitate, design, and model digital age teaching and learning. In addition, I am also curious to know how Moodle, WebCT, and Vista all stack up together and look forward to finding out which LMS is right for online learning. Other web-based approaches will also catch my attention like the ‘Pro-D’ case study and the practice of ‘Cradleboard’ which I’m sure will force me to think about when should and shouldn’t I use the web. The design and development of rubrics has always been a weakness of mine and I’m looking forward to developing that skill as I work together in groups to create a ‘Delivery Platform Evaluation Rubric’.
To be a better educator means staying on top of all the technologies and embracing them as potential teaching tools. As current technology coordinator for my school, I am currently working towards creating a curriculum for our school district using a class set of iPads and iTunes University. It is my goal to understand how people learn in order to develop an effective interactive online and tablet-based curriculum and using the techniques taught in ETEC 565A I believe I can reach that goal. Time spent developing my understanding of online communication tools via the Blackboard Learning System with my peers and correspondance with my instructor may help me achieve my goal. In addition, learning about the trending social media will keep me in check and provide me the opportunity to create assignments that are in tune with how students use online websites and social media in their lives. Alexander, in his article ‘Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?” may help me make more decisions in this area. I have always had an interest in multimedia, and so I’m very excited about learning how to use that medium to help achieve my learning outcomes for my technology classes. George Siemens’, article “Evaluating Media Characteristics”, will prove to be complicated but none the less help further my knowledge on using multimedia to further achieve my learning outcomes. Learning about flash, creating audio via the open source program Audacity, discovering PalTalk and VoIP alternatives will help provide the necessary tools I need to master multimedia in the classroom.
Having a very busy life on top of dedicating long hours to my career I feel that time will be the deciding factor in my journey through this course. Using technology as a teaching tool requires time to familiarize yourself with resource and then time to create a teaching plan. As an intermediate teaching professional, I feel that some of the concepts revealed in this course make take years to fully develop while others can be implemented immediately. Getting students ready for blogging via kidblog.org will not take me much time, however, implementing a Moodle learning module may take a good portion of this year. Learning the way around a web 2.0 site might not be too difficult to understand, but determining how to create a rubric for it my prove more difficult.
For me technology is a powerful tool for collaborating and learning. Classroom learning activities can follow different pedagogical approaches and didactic concepts depending on the educator. It is important to realize that without a complete understanding of how to implement technology with student learning I will not be able to maximize my potential as an educator. With the guidance, direction, and understanding of Natasha Boskic, the ETEC 565A course is a step for me towards achieving many of my professional goals.