A Green and White Culmination of Collaboration and Cooperation
By Robert Breedlove
My time with in the MAET (Masters of Arts in Educational Technology) program at Michigan State University is coming to a close. However, I feel like my learning in technology has just begun. I started the program with the intention of bettering myself in Educational Technology. I am leaving the program with the intention of trying to make a difference with others and how they integrate technology into their classrooms and lives. I truly hope that I can make a difference with as many educators as possible. To help them see how useful and creative technology can be. Throughout my education at Michigan State I have had several rewarding classes. The knowledge and skills I learned in these classes I will take with me for the rest of my career.
I began my educational career at Michigan State in Ireland of all places. I signed up for the overseas cohort. I wanted to travel the world while learning about technology. I am from a small town and had rarely been outside of the states surrounding Michigan. I really enjoyed my time overseas, especially since I could feel free to learn without all the distractions of school. It was a tremendous amount of work in a very short time but well worth not having to take classes during the school year. I now know that all too well because my third and final year I have been taking classes online to finish my degree
I think it is also important to remember that “right” today may not be “right” tomorrow. Education is constantly changing and we need to be ready to adjust to the challenges that are presented to us. The MAET program does a great job of preparing us for this reflection - rework - reflection - rework cycle.
Some of my classes took an incredible amount of thinking and problem solving to be successful. I think that is one of the great benefits of the MAET program. All of the instructors and staff continually push the students to use higher order thinking skills but also to reflect on what we have done. These reflections are beneficial for every project to be the most polished product the student can put forward. We are always encouraged to go back and tweak until we get it right.
Photo by Me - National University of Ireland
In Learning in School and Other Settings the major project was called “Dream It.” This project was at one point an opportunity for students in the program to submit a grant to make their “dream” in education a reality. For my project I wanted to try and solve a problem that I was experiencing in my classroom and use technology to solve it. I did not concern myself with cost; just finding what would work best for my students. My dream it project was rooted in reading comprehension.
Click to see my Dream It Project
My “problem” was my 6th grade students are expected to read from textbooks that are written at an 8th grade reading level. Well, to add insult to injury many of my students are behind in their reading level, so we have students at a 4th grade reading level trying to absorb content meant to be read by 8th graders. I think this leads many of my students to a defeatist attitude. They feel like it is too hard and this time they are probably right. I did have an alternative for my students that lowered the grade level slightly but that required printing large packets to replace what was in the textbook. My other major concern with the textbooks was their age. The textbooks were printed in 2005. This means the content my students are learning is 10 years old. In the world of science this is a very long time to not update your learning.
Click to see more from this textbook
It turns out there was a solution that was able to solve both issues. Newsela is an online resource that adapts current event articles to the grade level desired. Not only does Newsela rewrite the article at the requested grade level, it even changes the title of the article based on the reading comprehension level.
This platform allows all students to experience the same current event article at their individual level. This is extremely helpful with students that are interested in the topic but are apprehensive because of the challenge of the article. The other major advantage is the articles are fresh and current. They deal with many different disciplines and other teachers, not only science can benefit from this resource.
Learning Technology Through Design is a course I am currently taking to finish up my degree. This course has given me several tools to use when looking at how things are designed well and how it seems like no one was around on design day. Specifically we get examples from our classmates of things demonstrate a good design model and things are designed very poorly. I think this is important when relating this to education. What we teach is constantly going through this process of design. The one guarantee is that things are going to change. When looking at building a quality class, whether it is online or in the classroom, we can take some of these lessons with us and apply them.
Click to visit Newsela
One of the resources that I believe I will be referring back to very often is the Bootcamp Bootleg from the Institute of Design at Stanford. This compilation of tools is valuable in several aspects of education. For example there are several examples of activities that you could incorporate into any classroom, any subject. They go through the how and why of each tool and give solid examples of what it should look like. Even though this is not technically education specific, I think this a great example of taking something that does not necessarily seem like it would fit in education and making it applicable.
Click to check out the PDF
The major project in this particular class is to take a problem of practice and design a solution to help solve the problem. Like any good design we go from brainstorming, to coming up with ideas, to prototyping and testing. Just like good science we make a prediction, test it and repeat until we get consistent results.
My problem of practice is the amount of tests that my 5th graders are required to take each marking period. We are currently only focusing on the “essential standards” and it has become apparent that if/when we try to expand to all of the standards there will not be any time teach or learn the content, just time to test. I think we can look right back at science to see this is not the best policy. We cannot test, test, test and expect our students to have any engaging learning.
Creativity in Teaching and Learning was the most fun I had in any class in the program. That is saying a lot for the course especially since I took it online. I was really looking forward to finishing my schooling overseas but life happened and I needed to finish the program as soon as possible. I was slightly apprehensive to take courses online but I had to do what I had to do. The creativity class really pushed my thinking to the edge and beyond. All of the projects in the course had us examine an aspect of what we were teaching in a different way. I chose to work with fractions for my focus.
Click to see my creativity coursework
Creativity and fractions are two things that you would think would not really fit together too well. I struggled several times to get an idea that would fit with the assignment but once I did I was off and running. I found some really neat ways to teach my students all about fractions that are definitely outside the box. I think this was a major part of this course it helped me to look at my teaching in a different light and think about how I could make it better.
Some of the concepts I had to apply to fractions were modeling and perceiving. With the modeling project I wanted to find a way to not only show my students what fractions look like but to allow them to manipulate those fractions to see how they fit together. I used a program called Sketchup and made several representations of fractions with in my Sketchup world.
Click to see my Modeling Project
For perceiving I took a pop song and had my students study the beats per measure (had to teach myself some music theory, and I still don’t know for sure if I am getting it right). This song has a definite pattern and we could count them and see how the pieces fit together to make the whole just like how fractions come together to make the whole.
Click to see my Perceiving Project
One constant throughout my entire time at Michigan State has been TPACK (Technology pedagogy and content knowledge). TPACK is a framework that allows educators to examine teaching. You can apply TPACK to any content and/or lesson to make sure it fits within three major aspects of teaching and learning.
Click to read more about TPACK
Reproduced by permission of the publisher, © 2012 by tpack.org
The first major aspect is technology knowledge, although this is the first letter, I have learned that technology is not always the ideal solution. Funny to say from someone who is getting their Master’s in Educational Technology but sometimes what we want to do and what is best for our students are two completely different things. The second aspect is pedagogy knowledge or the process and procedures of teaching. The third is content knowledge; it goes without saying that you must know your content well in order for your students to be successful. TPACK is essentially a Venn diagram that overlaps these three aspects. The “Sweet Spot” is where all three come together. TPACK is essentially a measuring stick I use to make sure I am on the right path.
The masters program as whole has taught me many important lessons. Along with the lessons of safe and effective travel abroad, I have learned a great deal about collaboration. Much of what we do in education and especially in the MAET program is about collaboration. As educators we love to share information with anyone that will listen. Being a part of the MAET program has given me access to a seemingly unlimited set of resources. We will continue to collaborate with each other through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. We are able to share a wealth of information across a vast set of disciplines, not to mention all with the ability to do this at a great distance from each other.
Another important take away with the MAET program is cooperation, we do not always choose our partners but we always find a way to get the work done. I believe in every class I have taken there has been some component of cooperation. The advantage of being in a technology rich program is that we can accomplish these group projects without having to actually meet. For example I participated in a Google Slides Presentation (think Powerpoint) with 4 other students in one of my classes. The advantage of using a platform like Google is that collaboration can happen in real time. I can add a slide to our presentation and someone can see it right away, and maybe question why it is there or give a suggestion on what to do next. All communication for this project was handled through email, discussion forums and the presentation itself. If we did get stuck on a topic or need to clarify something we could have used a video conferencing tool.
My most memorable point of practice is the idea of a growth mindset. I try to incorporate this philosophy every day in my teaching. When this topic came up during a project my first year in the program I immediately could relate to it. It was a “light bulb” moment. One of those times when you say, “That is exactly how I feel and that is what I want instill in my students.” A growth mindset is basically the belief that we learn more from our failures than we do our successes. This is a very difficult thing to convince students. My students are very insecure with failure. I do not believe we have done a good enough job showing students that it is okay to fail.
Success and failure are only one area of the growth mindset. It is critical to my teaching because it helps me to give my students feedback that will influence them to push themselves in their learning. My epiphany manifested while researching our Wicked Problem Project. A Wicked Problem is a problem that is really not solvable. We can try to put a dent in it, but most likely it will not be completely solved. Our task is to chisel away with many solutions to try and ease the bigger Wicked Problem. We used the idea of giving students the opportunity to fail in class and making it okay to do so. My group ran across a TedTalk from Eduardo Briceno, fair warning it is almost 11 minutes long but I think the value of the talk outweighs the time spent with it. The idea that we can use different language when speaking to students really resonated with me. I try everyday to make sure my students know that they may not be able to solve a problem today but with effort (and failure) they can and will be successful.
During my time in the MAET program I have collaborated and cooperated to learn and apply the best practices while using technology in education. I am proud to call myself a Spartan and cheer “Go Green, Go White.” I am excited to see what the future holds and feel like I am in the right place at the right time to really capitalize on what we can accomplish for ourselves but more importantly for our students.
Picture Attributions
Scientific Method - thecraftyclassroom.com
Science Textbook - http://glencoe.mheducation.com/sites/0078617707/index.html
Spartan Logo - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_State_Spartans
Bootcamp Bootleg - http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf
TPACK - Koehler, M.J. Tpack.org. Retrieved from http://www.tpack.org/