Looking at a flight plan, is much like going surfing. You do not simply throw yourself into the water hoping to catch a wave. A good starting point is to look at the weather forecast for both the wind direction and wave altitude.

In my own teaching practices, in the study of vectors in Calculus and relative motion in Physics, it involves an understanding of how vectors can represent velocities within their motion relative to another frame. You may have experienced this while sitting in the back of a car while looking at another car moving with the same speed beside yours: it appears that you are both stationary.

The following belief will attempt to draw on what I try to bring into my teaching to get the best educational experience for my students: you must have an understanding of goals and creating a plan to achieve them. While it could be fun being on a tangent and exploring the air and water, when you need to rescue Jane, there is no time to waste!

I will represent the resultant vector as the actual path taken (velocity of swimmer relative to ground), the water velocity vector relative to the ground as those goals given by ETEC565A and my own personal goals as the velocity of the swimmer relative to the water.There is a formula that connects these quantities:

Vswimmer/ground = Vswimmer/water + Vwater/ground

Flight path = personal goals + overall course goals

As a graduate from the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, the focus and goal of the overall program is for future teacher’s to start seeing their role in a different way. Instead of the traditional classroom teacher into a facilitator of learning. Reflections were an integral part of the learning and it made us look deep into our epistemologies. We were then introduced to various schools of thought: constructivism, behaviourism, cognitivism, situated theory, and conceptual change. Initially, I was surprised by the focus on pedagogical knowledge with limited overlaps in content knowledge. It was not until I read the TPACK framework (Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P., 2009) where I understood that this was a recent change in teacher training programs: a shift from content into pedagogical knowledge. However, as Koehler and Mishra (2009) argue that in the 21st century teaching, a teacher education program needs to consider training educators with the TPACK framework, i.e. at the intersection of Content, Pedagogy, and Technology, all within a given context. The TPACK framework was introduced to me while studying an additional qualification of teaching and learning through e-learning. Realizing that there was a large gap of my current teaching practices and those that my students will need in the future, I enrolled in the MET program.

In my first course, ETEC511, one of the readings that changed the way I see myself as an educator is from the framework by Kalantzis and Cope (2010), where they argue moving beyond the facilitator of learning role into the teacher as a designer and manager of learning. It is in this new role that I see myself embracing and have been passionate about ever since. My goals in this program started off in a way to hit the sweet spot of the TPACK framework and has evolved to fulfill the role for the vision of new learning as a designer. Amateurishly, I designed my own personal course website using Weebly as a hosting tool, you may access it by clicking the following link: www.quantumtunneling.net

One of the goals that I have been always interested has been as described by Kalantzis and Cope (2010), that a designer works effectively in collaborative knowledge activities and shares knowledge with peers. My website has been a way of me helping out other teachers within my school, in Ontario and beyond. At the moment it is not yet fully developed as I am learning more about the design process independently and within the MET program. In this course, ETEC565A, one of the overall goals is for the learners to create a sophisticated prototype LMS course site. While working towards this goal I will aim to also simultaneously reflect on the learning experience and apply it into my own course website or seek out alternative ways of hosting my designed resources. It will be exciting to see which path I will end up with, even more exciting will be that my choice in technology will be developed as an overall course goal in ETEC565A is to purposefully select learning technologies. These learning technologies are not only limited to the choice of LMS but throughout this course it will extend in becoming familiar with a comprehensive range of communication tools.

During this familiarization stage of communication tools, social media will be a focus. As stated earlier, the focus has been on the traditional schools of learning but these were explored before the development and affordances that technology has on learning. Siemens (2005) has proposed in connectivism that learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions and currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. A clear distinction should be made between social constructivist learning in which occurs in LMS discussion forums and connecting into social media, where the emphasis will be on nurturing and maintaining connections, which are needed to facilitate continual learning and when media is involved: developing participatory competencies as argued by Kafai and Peppler (2011). It will be my goal to bring connectivism learning activities into my own teaching practice.

With my personal goals and those of the course, I will be able to develop instructional design opportunities that applies transformation with emerging technologies as challenged by Veletsianos (2011).

1. Design opportunities that allow engagement beyond course activities
2. Design for lasting impression
3. Design for intrigue, risk-taking, and challenge
4. Design for engagement
5. Design for reflection

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