My name is Michael Yates, I am an educator and lifelong learner. As an educator my philosophy is to use technology to not only enhance student learning but assist other educators to perform administrative tasks in an efficient and timely manner. Also, as an ELL instructor in non immersive environments I have taken the educational philosophy of show, not tell. This has influenced this ePortfolio heavily.
Technology for me is an enabler, it enables me to reach those digital natives that fill my classroom and are looking to me to speak their language. This desire to speak their language has led me to invest my time in flipped and blended lessons, which I now create on a weekly basis. These digital lessons have led me to another passion which is the use of small data in the classroom. These blended and flipped lessons feed data into templates that can then be used to report to parents, students, administrators and inform my own instruction.
As a lifelong learner, I am a student at the University of British Columbia completing a Master in Educational Te
chnology. This program was a heavy investment in time and money, so I had some very specific goals going into it. The top three are:
- To advance my career in the field of instructional design by refining my previously acquired IT skills to be more applicable to education.
- To develop a clear understanding of how technology can be effectively (and efficiently) used in the classroom to advance student academic development.
- To acquire a world class degree that will assist me in furthering my career and progress past the classroom.
Now it has taken me quite some time to realize that my initial goals were not overly realistic, which is the reason I chose to use a simplified version of the stages of grief as the metaphor to organize this site. My MET experiences have brought me through the stages of grief, where I went from Shock (My first few courses were an eye opener where I found them very theoretical and was confused about the direction in which my learning was supposed to go). Bargaining (I was in a constant battle with myself, trying to find my own way of applying the content into my own teaching practice). Then finally Acceptance where I started seeing that theory can inform instruction and I got to play with multimedia assessments. I have taken my experiences within MET and applied it to my professional career, by creating my own YouTube channel to house my flipped lessons for my students.
About Me