E-portfolio Assignment 6: Portfolio Synthesis Reflection

 

Response

Flight Path Précis

I had several reasons why I wanted to enter UBC’s Master in Educational Technology program and register for ETEC 565A. In regards to the course, I had either an interest, experience or familiarity with many of the technologies being examined and, in the case of Moodle, I saw it as a challenging tool to learn. Since Moodle is so prolific in online learning, I felt that familiarizing myself with it was key to my learning journey into how to implement an online course.   I felt at the time, and still do, that I have been in the field long enough to have experiences to draw upon and give context to the theories and concepts I would be learning. I also felt that the assignments in this course would challenge me to push my barriers and reach to all of the skills I have learned to create a comprehensive online learning experience. By adding a formal structure to my own developing educational technology philosophy, I would be better able to organize my future experiences and make me more effective in my educator/mentor position that I enjoy so much.

Learning Management System – Moodle

Overall, I have found the experience of completing a Moodle (Bremer & Bryant, 2005) online course to be rewarding. At times I found the limitations of Moodle, in terms of formatting, quite frustrating but now I realize that these challenges forced me to think more outside of the box and solve these problems in a more creative way. Moodle is far from being perfect and has a long way to go in terms of ease of use, but I realize now how powerful it is as a tool to bring your course to an online audience.   On reflection, I am glad to have had the opportunity to complete this assignment. Not only was I able to utilize my interest in educational website design to fulfill the assignment’s components but it has given me practical experience which will better inform me when completing future assignments in the same vein as the LMS proposal or Benoits dilemma. I definitely see this activity as just another experience which confirms my belief that without support the integration of technology within the education system is set up to fail (Gagnon, 2012). It is hard to understand, how we as teachers, accept the lack of support that we see as our professional duty to provide to our students. If I found aspects of this learning process frustrating with my interest and ability level, I couldn’t imagine how the average unmotivated teacher would feel. In my experience as a mentor, teacher frustration often leads to actual or perceived failure with the end result of no adoption of the new tool, behaviour, etc.

Multimedia & Authoring Tools

I enjoy any opportunity to create digital works. I find it addresses my need to express myself artistically and is very rewarding in terms of overcoming technical challenges. Some of the multimedia and authoring tools I have used are listed below and cover a wide range of uses and environments from online, cloud, mobile, software to hardware.

Presentation Tools

• ThingLink is both a free iPad and web based app for creating interactive presentations using Rich Media Tags. I used this tool as the “Getting to Know You” activity for the introduction of my Moodle Course.

Image and Video Production Tools

• Puppet Pals 2 is a very interesting iPad app that allows for up to 4 people to control and voice a virtual puppet. At first I had planned to do the voices myself but soon found many willing actors in my grade 4 class. They loved the app so much that I had to promise to include it next semester in their own work. A resounding review in my mind.

 

• iMovie app was used on my macbook mainly as a way to access theme music and text features for use in my digital storytelling assignment. I used iMovie as the final cutting and editing point in my project. I find that it is a the best tool for this because of the ease of being able to add or remove audio.

 

• YouTube is a free web based service accessible via a YouTube account. I have used YouTube Editor several times for video editing as my requirements were fairly straightforward and simple. I used the enhancement features to create transitions, merged and trimmed clips and in some cases added closed captioning. As mentioned earlier, YouTube was used to host several videos created for this course.
• BigHugeLabs is a free web based service used to create a movie poster for my digital story. I thought the site was child-friendly and provided a nice teaser image to show the day before.

 

Overall ETEC 565A Experience

Overall, I enjoyed my ETEC 565A experience. Some of the learning and growth I experienced was expected and predicted within my flight path but some was a surprise. These moments of clarity came from my interaction and reflection with required readings, peers in the discussion forums and by completing the assignments. I feel that the biggest growth point came from having to use Moodle to create my online course. Coming from a background of using sites like Weebly or WordPress I feel I had grown complacent with the ease of drag and drop site building and found that Moodle challenged me to solve my own issues instead of relying on someone else’s coding.

SECTIONS

The scholarly article that made the greatest impact was Bates & Poole’s 2003 A Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. This was my second course using this framework as part of the content but my experience in this course differed as it had more relevance throughout the whole course. It was this application, which seem to have the greatest impact in my adoption of the process both academically and professionally. It became evident that this framework would be a great asset for my school especially given the absence of any real evaluation process or procedure for acquiring technology and the past misuse of funds buying “The Next Great Thing”.   SECTIONS offers flexibility , in that it can be used by a variety of users whether it be a classroom teacher, school administrator or district specialist. This is achieved using its strengths in applying a common language and terminology to assessing the educational affordances and constraints of a variety of technological mediums and media. This allows information to be shared and discussed amongst a variety of professionals minimizing the alienating qualities that sometimes accompanies technology. It also offers a balanced approach focusing on multiple aspects, not just those that traditionally involved ITC departments and given a disproportionate higher value.

Discussion Forums

Discussion forums were, until this course, a tool which I had undervalued and now see as a great learning experience. For me, there were several discussion threads which caused me to question myself and reflect. Not only was this cause for great reflection regarding how I chose to answer the questions, peers, etc. but on why I was responding and in some cases, not responding.

Assignments

On reflection throughout the course, I was able to identify that I was often going off task when completing assignments. I would read the scenario or instructions, then jump into brainstorming and working on the drafting process. However, I had to add the additional protocol of rereading what was being asked at least once during the brainstorming and drafting process. I think my writing mimics my conversation pattern where I tend to speak in tangents especially when excited about a topic or subject. I found it helped to create a bulleted list of the instructions and, in the case of a discussion scenario, key factors and check off as I completed them.   Next Steps

Technologies to Explore Moving Forward

Mobile apps, open badges and commercial versions of Learning Management Systems (LMS) are technologies I would like to explore further as I move forward in my educational technology practice.

Commercial Learning Management Systems

So far within the MET program, I have gained hands on experience using Canvas and Moodle which are both open source LMS. Other than using Connect and its Blackboard LMS as a student or reading articles about them, I do not have first hand experience developing a course at the teacher or administrator level to make a comparison to my work on open source systems. I think having this opportunity at some point within the program would provide a more balanced experience.

Badges

While developing my Moodle course, I examined the badge function in the Administration section. I had heard of badges in education while doing some reading on Twitter and it interested me. Possibly this was do to fond memories of earning badges in Scouts and having them adorn my camp-fire blanket. In my course, on completion of each module and the course overall, students would earn an Open Badge to display in Moodle and take with them using your Mozilla Backpack. I am interested on reading the evolving research in this area and, if positive, experiment with applications in learning not only with students in school but with teachers I provide professional development with. With the move to e-portfolios versus traditional hard copy versions, having the ability to track and curate accomplishments in this manner is appealing.

Mobile Apps

Mobile applications for handheld devices are also an area of interest moving forward. Specifically, I am looking forward to evaluating mobile apps using Bates and Poole’s 2003 SECTIONS model. In my school, handheld devices like Samsung 10.1 Notes are being used without any guiding policy or educationally based framework. It would appear that teachers are installing, and using apps without any sort of assessment and evaluation process in place. In addition to applying analysis to apps, there is some interest in our school to examine the applicability of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). My role might be expanded to offering advice and suggestions to students and teachers on effective educational apps that can be used in and out of the classroom.

Being a Lifelong Learner

Being a lifelong learner, in terms of educational technology or not, is an integral and intertwined component within my educational philosophy. Whether I am offline or online, how I teach is grounded in my educational philosophy based on my academic and experiential knowledge gained both in and outside of the classroom. I like to view myself as becoming what Paulo Friere described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) as a ‘humanist educator’. One who believes in the ideals of engaging themselves and students, “…in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization” (p. 75). To counter ‘banking’ or traditional education models, I work towards a Friere’s “…problem-posing education”, system in which the, “…teacher [is] no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialog with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (p.80). I have found many times when my best lessons are when students feel confident enough to show me something that I may be out of date in. Being a humanist teacher, I look to create a supportive, safe and caring environment which fosters and encourages learning. I would look, as Dewey did, to create a classroom which, “… took the form of an “embryonic social community”, one in which students were encouraged to cooperate and work together and learn from each other as well as from their teachers” (Bryant, Dunnill, Flanagan, & Hayes , 2007, p.193), Although the virtual classroom requires, at times, different procedures and methods to create such an environment the end goal is the same. While keeping to these constructivist ideals, I am unable to separate myself from either the role of educator and learner fuelled by the curiosity that this dynamic creates.

References

Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.   Bryant, R., Dunnill, R., Flanagan, K., & Hayes, D. (2007). Teaching and training in post-compulsory education. McGraw-Hill International.   Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group. Sections framework. (2010). University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Retrieved from http://wiki.ubc.ca/images/1/19/SECTIONS_Framework.pdf