Bob Poelking
Social Studies Teacher & Michigan State Grad Student
Annotated
Transcript
MAET is a program with multiple paths through, below I have encapsulated my experiences and memories of my journey through the program.
MAET: Master of Arts in Educational Technology
TE: Teacher Education
CEP: Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education
TPACK: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge
UDL: Universal Design for Learning
Spring 2012
TE 803 Professional Roles & Teaching Practice II-
Dr. Dorthea Anagnostopoulos
The end-point of Michigan State’s student teacher program in Chicago, this class focused on developing skills and best practices in the classroom. A flexible class due to the wide range of classrooms that the participants worked in, technology was encouraged but not required to be used. In the class itself, we employed an early video conference software that required setting up a camera and a projector, as well as Google Docs. Personally, this class led to my re-tooling digital assignments to hard copies to be used in my placement that had one computer lab.
Skills Gained: Flexibility between digital and hard copies, working with limited resources.
TE 804 Reflection and Inquiry in Teaching Practice II-
Dr. Justin Bruner
Focused specifically on Social Studies content in the Secondary classroom, Dr. Bruner’s class was another video conferencing class that relied heavily on Google Docs, and due to the clunky nature of the technology the cohort regularly had to troubleshoot technical failures in the class and find other ways to interact with our classmates. As the class had a large focus on sharing ideas and workshopping assignments, we would regularly split into small groups and employ Skype as well as some screencasting programs to share our creations with our classmates back in East Lansing.
Skills Gained: Communicating and workshopping ideas with peers, improved concept of team projects that can be employed in student work
Spring 2013
CEP 810 Teaching for Understanding with Technology-
Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf & Craig McMichael
This was my first proper MAET class; it introduced me to the TPACK process, which I had heard of before, but never had the opportunity to jump into. 810 also encouraged students to create/ curate their Twitter accounts to foster an online professional learning community. The class also made note of the importance of responsible digital citizenship for both ourselves as educators as well as our students. Progressing in the class focused on SIG projects with peers in collaborative learning and presentation experiences.
Skills Gained: Management of Social Media Presence as it applies to both educators and students(curse you, SnapChat). New ways to develop digital classwork and cross-curricular assignments.
CEP 811 Adapting Innovative Technology to Education-
Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf & Sara Beauchamp Hicks
Centering around an EdTech blog (which is visible here ) with the entries reflecting on a number of Ed Tech experiments. I found myself particularly drawn to MERLOT, a site dedicated to indexing and sharing educational resources. I also tinkered with Web Quest designs on Weebly through the lens of UDL framework and tried my hand at creating and editing Wikis. Out of all of the classes I took for the MAET program, I feel that this one had the most concrete effect on me.
Skills Gained Practical knowledge and experience of orchestrating multi-level assignments and using the right tool/ resource for the job.
Summer 2013
CEP 812 Applying Educational Technology to Issues of Practice- Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf & Sara Beauchamp Hicks
This course featured the same blog as 811, this time focusing on issues that arose in the technological sphere as it expanded and shifted. Aimed at finding the best ways to employ technology in a classroom filled with digital natives, I authored a survey for high school students that sought to see what they thought the best uses 1-to-1 devices were in a school setting. In a collaborative vein, I worked with a group into researching approaches to data storage and digital preservation that was then presented via Voice Thread technology.
Skills Gained: Long distance, asynchronous digital collaboration. A sizable jump in educational technology research skills and database usage.
CEP 820 Teaching Students Online-
Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf, Anne Heintz, & Sandra Sawaya
An online course looking at how we teach online. Within I worked on testing out various types of class websites like Google Sites, WikiSpaces, and Blackboard. I also analyzed the workability and value of different virtual classes i.e. if your school ran Java applets, then using Chrome was a non-starter. I also found this class to be the beginning of a short but productive relationship with TechSmith's Jing technology which was a great way to capture screens in motion while talking over the action. The biggest idea dealt with in 820 was the concept of the “Flipped” classroom, as well as how to most effectively hybridize a classroom and assess student skills within those settings.
Skills Gained: Improved familiarity with screencasting and how best to employ it. Development and increased optimization of personal school websites.
Fall 2013
CEP 800 Learning in Schools and Other Settings-
Dr. Dana Henriksen
Dr. Henriksen’s class stemmed from implementing concrete examples of using Educational Technology in real world settings, rather than some of the more abstract goals of other classes. We were given a very wide berth, asked to tinker within UDL mechanics to come up with (or modify existing) lessons in new ways. It was here I learned to use Audacity to produce a little Election Trivia podcast and refurbished a lesson I had first written my Senior year about Nuclear weapons for a more technologically inclined classroom, while still accommodating those students who felt better working in meatspace (i.e. the real world).
Skills Gained: How to translate in-class work to the digital space and vice-versa. Improved selectivity in technological choices to streamline the student experience.
CEP 822 Approaches to Educational Research-
Dr. Leigh Graves Wolf
Focused on the various steps of a research project, in my case “how can students most effectively use their iPads/ tablets”, 822 asked the participants to simultaneously take in a wide range of readings and books curated by Dr. Wolf and to engage in a lengthy analysis of articles about our individual topics. By concentrating on in-class device utility, my research dealt largely with the boom in 1-to-1 tech that was swiftly entering the secondary teaching environment. At the end of the project I was dealing with the increasing number of smart phones in classes and how they could be used to mitigate time lost in Social Studies classes to administrative scheduling conflicts. Though it sounds amorphous, Approaches to Educational Research resulted in a 50 page document tracing the entire project and the start of my never ending quest to find a way to safely use SnapChat in class.
Skills Gained Using phones in a productive fashion, rather than banning them out of hand. Working with teachers in other departments to gather data and then effectively disseminating conclusions to them.
Fall 2018
CEP 815 Technology and Leadership-
Candice Marcotte & Kyle Shack
Contrary to many of the other classes in MAET, 815 did not focus on the classroom, but rather on the behind the scenes aspects of Ed Tech world. Using a multimedia approach including Screen Recorder and Zoom Meetings with my peers as well as Mrs. Marcotte and Mr. Shack to dig in to deeper questions and juxtapose the leadership seen in a secondary school or in a district technology office. The class worked to have the students develop action plans and professional development events that would address real-world issues within our educational communities. Paired with this skill building, Technology and Leadership also presented the students with readings intended to develop critical leadership skills that were not aimed explicitly at the Educational sphere, instead enabling us to create connections between the business world and that of our own lives.
Skills Gained: Liaising with non-teacher stakeholders in the educational world. Developing workable plans to affect actual change in a classroom or school and effectively communicating it.
Summer 2019
CEP 807 Proseminar in Educational Technology-
Dr. Matt Koehler & Aric Gaunt
The Capstone for the MAET program, Dr. Koehler's class mixes creation of the Wix (or any other web creation suite one might choose) site you currently see with an introspective look back at all of the classes above this one, challenging the participants to look back on their work and to see what they got out of it. It is not all navel gazing, though, 807 regularly employs class-wide Flipgrid meetings where peers can give and get advice on the content of their site and come together in a decentralized community of sorts to look back on individual and shared experiences throughout the program.
Skills Gained Web design and a refined view of what exactly everything I have done and accomplished in MAET means as it applies to my teaching now.