Educational Technology Showcase
My Educational Technology showcase contains graduate work artifacts completed throughout my journey as a part of the Master's of Art in Educational Technology Program at Michigan State University. Each row is designed to express a theme that I focused on that is aimed around the integration of technology. The first theme is active learning: the process of students engaging in reading, writing, discussion, or problem solving activities that promote analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content, including cooperative and project-based learning. The second theme, problems of practice, refers to three subtopics that are addressed: well-structured problems in which there is only one solution, ill-structured problems in which there can be multiple solutions to the problem, and wicked problems in which there is usually no solution or there is an extremely complex solution which can be difficult to identify. The Universal Design for Learning theme covers implemented guidelines to make sure that all students, including students with special needs, have equal access to the same materials. The last theme, technology and language learning, represents using technology, such as computer based language-learning programs, to better the process of language learning. Therefore, below you will find four main themes that I found to be the most influential towards my own learning experiences and how I can apply these educational technology topics in my own Spanish classroom.
Active Learning
The Importance of Active Learning
I have found that many students, and parents, can have many preconceived notions about what it means to take a foreign language class and what to expect in that class. Therefore, it was important for me as an educator to address these preconceived notions. I created a screencast that focused on the importance of active learning and how hands-on learning about a language's culture, in addition to the language itself, is extremely important in order to give students every opportunity to learn things that they wouldn't typically learn in a more traditional foreign language classroom setting.
Active Learning by Creating a Digital Fashion Show
Active learning can be presented in many formats, whether it's in the classroom completing projects or out in the real world exploring new cities or environments. By the end of this course, the students will ultimately be tasked with creating a digital fashion show. I used a backward design approach when creating this course (I focused on the desired outcome first) to create a hands-on, active learning project in which the students also learn important vocabulary and grammar points while having a discussion about the similarities and differences about the clothes in Spain compared to the clothes in the United States.
DreamIT
CAN COMPUTER-ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING IMPROVE ORAL LANGUAGE COMPETENCY IN LEARNERS OF A SECOND LANGUAGE?
Problems of Practice
Ill-structured Problems with the Possibility of Different Outcomes
As an educator, I am constantly faced with problems of practice in my classroom. I was asked to choose an ill-structured problem that I am faced with and address what this problem is, how it affects my students, and how I as an educator can address this problem and be prepared for an issue like this ahead of time. I created a Screencast that discusses an ill-structured problem: that students can be given the same assignment but how there can be many different outcomes for that same assignment based on the individual student. I chose to research a tool called MyBrainShark which allows students to complete the same assignment as their peers without there being one set path to accomplish this task.
Interviewing for an Educational Technology Position
Despite being an educator, I had never been put in a "leadership" or "management" role before. However, this assignment actually had one of the biggest impacts on my learning throughout this entire program. I was challenged and pushed outside of my comfort zone when addressing this problem of practice. I was required to be a leader and to think like a leader. Therefore, I pulled together all of my resources and created a hypothetical job posting for an Assistant Director of Educational Technology at a local university, a job that I could see myself one day applying for. I then created potential interview questions and a rubric of criteria to rate each possible candidate in order to best assess each question and potential candidate for the position.
Universal Design for Learning Adaptations
Using Technology in the Classroom to Assist Visually Impaired Students
After being challenged to choose a learning need that I would like to know more about, I realized that I never considered how my different reading, writing, and speaking stations would be accessible to students who had visual impairments. Therefore, I wanted to learn more about different types of visual impairments and how assistive technologies can help students with visual impairments. I chose to focus on NaturalReader which is a great text-to-speech option for students who are visually impaired because it allows any type of text to be read aloud in English as well as some other languages, such as Spanish. Therefore, my students can use this text-to-speech option to assist with lecture materials, PowerPoints, handouts, textbook pages, and much more.
Universal Design for Learning in a Spanish Lesson
I designed a country project presentation lesson for my Spanish students to complete and I used the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines to help me reassess my initital assignment and make adjustments where needed. I needed to make sure that I was increasing the flexibility of the curricula for all types of individuals. I mainly focused on making sure that everything presented was being done in as many visual ways as possible and that the information was also presented in a written format and was read aloud. I also included more ways that students could choose to present their information, such as the options to use text-to-speech, speech-to-text, aides, dictionaries, and much more for those students who needed the help of such devices.
Technology and Language Learning
How Technology Influences Language Learning
The acronymn SoTL stands for "Scholarship of Teaching and Learning." My task was to continue sharing by writing about my own teaching practices and interests. For my own Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Adventure, I chose to focus my attention on something that continues to greatly interest me and my teaching practices: how technology influences language learning both in and outside of the classroom. I created an annotated bibliography of the top 5 resources that I found throughout my search and how I thought these resources would further influence my own teaching.
Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Oral Language Competency
I have never conducted my own research within education and given that educational research is such an ever-growing field and sources are constantly changing, I knew this would be a challenging task. I was responsible for designing a research project and developing a grant proposal that would present how I planned to intelligently integrate new technologies to help student understanding within my subject area in a transformational way. My topic of choice was: “Can Computer-Assisted Language Learning Programs Improve Oral Language Competency in Learners of a Second Language?” I discussed some of the key ways of how I could see my project connect with other core issues in education and educational technology research through the form of a more traditional literature review.