From Technology Hater to Technology Innovator

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My journey with the use of technology in the classroom started out as being completely against it because while I was a student in high school. I was the student who had to share a family computer and so I would complete a majority of my work that required a computer in the library after school. From my own personal experiences in my education, I never wanted to be the teacher that used and required technology for my students. Then in the 2013-2014 school year, I was in my Single Subject Credential program at Sonoma State University and was placed at a middle school with a teacher who was consistently using technology in the classroom. At first, I was somewhat hesitant about the heavy use of technology but then I realized that my mentor teacher had a class set of MacBook Airs and iPod Touches. This is the exact moment where my thoughts on the use of technology changed because of the access there was in the classroom, it did not require students to be able to have access to it at home to complete assignments and projects. Throughout the year in my credential program, I always asked myself, “Why isn’t there a credential class about technology in the classroom?” This thought would be even more in the forethought of my mind when I started my current teaching job and administration wanted me to become a technology coach at my school site. That was the moment when I wanted to find a master’s program in the educational technology field and eventually pursue my PhD so I can start developing a course about educational technology for Single Subject Credential programs in California.  

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Step 1 to Becoming a Technology Innovator: Learn about TPACK

The first step in becoming a technology innovator is to learn about at least one of the educational theories behind the use of technology in the classroom. Heading into this first semester of Michigan State’s MAET (Master’s of Arts in Educational Technology), I did not really know what to expect or what I was truly going to learn. Within the first semester, I learned about TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. TPACK provides educators with the the content, what you specifically teach in your classroom, and combines it with pedagogy, which is how you teach in your classroom. These two ideas have to be the basis for which technology you decide to use in the classroom (Mishra and Kohler). As soon as I learned about TPACK, I realized that technology needs to be used in the appropriate way in connection with what a teacher is teaching and how they view teaching that content in their classroom. Technology should not just be used in the classroom to say it is being used in the classroom. I used TPACK as my guiding influence in order to develop professional development to demonstrate to other teachers on my campus how they could use Google Applications for Education in their content area classes. In addition, I also created a Wordpress website (which I learned how to make one and keep one updated through this program), where teachers could learn about additional educational technology tools that I did not cover in the professional development sessions. Click here to view the Wordpress website that I used with my fellow teachers throughout the 2016-2017 school year.

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Step 2 to Becoming a Technology Innovator: Connect with Other Educators (At Least Know How to Do So)

The second step in becoming a technology innovator is to know how to network with other educators about how they incorporate technology in the classroom. I never realized how important it is to network with other educators about a variety of ideas in education until my Networked Learning Project. For my Networked Learning Project, I wanted to focus on meal prepping through the use of my Crockpot. In order to learn more about meal prepping and which healthy recipes would work best with my Crockpot, I had to turn to networks that existed online. My learning network was Skinnytaste, which is a website founded and run by a woman who creates recipes with the use of a Crockpot and also has advice about meal prepping. In addition to this website, I also used Twitter and Facebook groups that were dedicated to Crockpots and meal prepping. Click here to learn more about my journey through my Networked Learning Project. I used my experiences from this Networked Learning Project to apply it to learning more about what other teachers are using in the classroom when it came to educational technology. Similar to my Networked Learning Project, I turned to Twitter to follow other educators who are up to date on a variety of technology tools that can be used in the school setting. I followed a variety of content area teachers so that I could gain more knowledge on what technology tools they are using in the classroom, so I could provide that information for the teachers on my campus. In addition to networking digitally, I was provided with the opportunity to attend a CUE (Computer Using Educators) conference in Napa where I was able to learn about technology innovation in the classroom in person. Then the following year I was able to attend a Google Applications for Education conference. All of these combined opportunities provided me with the ability to network with a variety of people who are involved with education.

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Step 3 to Becoming a Technology Innovator: Using Creativity to Drive a Curriculum

Sometimes educators get stuck in this place where we have taught the same class for a few years and we stop using creativity within the assignments we do in that class. Educators tend to do this because we become comfortable with what we are already teaching and do not necessarily want to spend more time rethinking how we should be teaching our content. Through CEP 818, I learned how creativity can be sparked in a specific content area with the incorporation of technology. Throughout that course I had to rethink how I could spark creativity for my students in a specific unit, which I chose to focus on the Civil War. In this class, I had to rethink about how I would use creativity in order to teach about different aspects of the Civil War. Click here to see my Sparks Notebook. From this class, I have been able to apply my creativity to the classes that I am currently teaching. For example, my students are just finishing up a unit about Human Rights and for their culminating project they created a website about everything they have learned in the unit. This allowed students to demonstrate what they have learned in a creative way because they could use whichever website platform they wanted to use and the design of their website was up to them as long as it portrayed all of the information that was required. Click here to see the directions to this project.

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Step 4 to Becoming a Technology Innovator: Staying Up on the Research 

Finding and reading scholarly articles was not a new concept to me because I have my Bachelor’s degree in History and throughout my undergraduate career I had to perform my own research on a variety of topics that related to history. I had never really thought that I also needed to do this when it came to education. Like many other educators I have tried to stay up to date with the current research through websites such as Edutopia. In CEP 822, I learned that articles that are on website such as Edutopia are just summaries of actual scholarly research articles. Throughout this course I learned how to find and analyze scholarly research about education and how this research should be incorporated into the classroom. Current research should be driving how our content is being taught in the classroom, which does not consistently happen because teachers are consistently busy but it is important that we do so in order to understand what is best for our current students in the classroom and how they learn and can demonstrate what they know to us. Now, I am making sure that I stay as up to date as possible with the current research that is out there in order to consistently improve my classroom for the students who are currently learning in my classroom whether that means it is through Project Based Learning or a Flipped Classroom or some combination thereof. The research skills that I learned through CEP 822 are now more important than ever before because I will be at a school site next year that is one-to-one with Chromebooks. This means that I am going to have to read up on the most recent educational research that there is available because I want my students to get the most out of having the one-to-one technology in their classes. CEP 822 really taught me that educators need to continue learning their subject because it is ever changing and evolving just like the technology and the way students learn with the technology that they have.

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Step 5 to Becoming a Technology Innovator: Create a Hybrid Course for Future Teachers

In my last semester of this program, I decided to take CEP 820, which is about designing an online class that could be used in the future. We had the choice to either make it a fully online class or a hybrid class, which means there is an online component but there is also face-to-face class sessions. I decided to start with planning what I would want to teach in my future credential class, which would be a hybrid class. In the online portion of the class, students are going to be completing readings and other assignments that are then going to be used in the face-to-face sessions. In the face-to-face sessions, students are going to be completing projects such as lesson plans and unit plans with ways in which they are going to incorporate technology into their classrooms. By the end of the semester, students will be prepared with pedagogy and theory in order to understand how to incorporate technology in a variety of different ways into their content area classes.

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Through setting up my own class online, I was able to further explore my own pedagogy for my classes which is when I realized I would like to try and have a flipped classroom at the next school I teach at because I want my students to be the center of the class instead of it being teacher centered. Through the use of a flipped classroom, students would be learning the core of the content at home through the use of technology. Then when students come to class, they will be working on projects and I will be able to provide even more one-on-one attention to each student about the content. The flipped classroom idea would only be possible if you can guarantee that students have access to technology at home. At the school site I am going to be at next year, the students are provided with Chromebooks that they are allowed to take home which means students are guaranteed access at home. With this ease of accessibility to technology I am going to try and incorporate the flipped classroom idea.

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Step 6: I am now a Technology Innovator.. Now what?

Throughout the past two years, I have learned about a variety of things about how technology can be incorporated into the classroom and what it takes for technology to actually be in the classroom in the first place. Through CEP 815, I was able to understand that all stakeholders have to be on board with technology in order for it to actually be implemented at the school level, whether that means having mobile Chromebook carts or going one-to-one with a specific kind of technology. I always thought it was important for technology to be accessible to every student and I always wondered why it was not already happening, I thought it was because of money but in reality it is really because all stakeholders involved have to find the value in technology.

From these past two years in this master’s program, it has really reignited my fire to really use the technology that is available to me in order to teach my students how to properly use it in all aspects of their life. It has helped me realize that I really want to continue on this path of being a technology innovator in the classroom. Next school year, I am really going to be able to do this since the school site I am going to be at is one-to-one with Chromebooks. This means I am going to be able to use my educational researching skills from CEP 822 in order to stay up to date with the current research that is happening around the use of one-to-one technology. In addition I will be able to use the creativity skills that I developed in CEP 818 to demonstrate to my students how they can still be creative through the use of technology. Lastly, I can take the skills that I learned from CEP 820 of online course design and be able to attempt to have a flipped classroom next year.

Outside of the classroom I want to be able to continue to be a technology leader and innovator at  the next school site I am at in order to continue to promote the use of technology across all content areas. I want to be able to do this through becoming a technology coach at a school site again and be able to train other teachers in helping their own departments with the integration of technology. After some more experience as a technology coach, I want to enroll in a PhD program that is focused on educational technology. This would allow me to further the knowledge that I have already gained from this master’s program. By going into a PhD program, I would then be able to perform my own research about educational technology and eventually design my own course about educational technology which could be taught in credential programs in California. By having an educational technology class in credential programs in California, it would expose new teachers to the implementation of technology before they receive their first teaching jobs and this means new teachers would have one less thing they would have to learn about, as well all know there is a lot to learn within the first year of teaching.

References

Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 60-70.