EDTECH Research

I feel like Rip Van Winkle a bit, as I remember wandering through the dark corners of libraries trying to find a particular article when I was in college.  The capacity to use Google Scholar and access these articles without venturing into those darkened corners seems like a revelation (and makes me want to say to my students that they have no idea how great they have it -- the research equivalent of saying, "in my day I had to walk a mile to school and it was uphill both ways.")  Access the Boise State library from the wilds of Colorado also seems quite magical.  Perhaps I would have been a bigger fan of research projects in college had this all been available way back then.

The articles I found reinforced my determination to use educational technology for inquiry-based learning and provided a few key cautions to my journey.  The biggest warning that came through was not to use technology as an end-all be-all but as a tool in the secondary mathematics classroom.  The role of the instructor doesn't disappear and become the internet.  The instructor must be even more careful and provide explicit guidance when there are so many thickets and distractions on the nexus of paths through cyberspace.

I was also frustrated with the articles that looked amazing but cost too much money to download!  I kept getting super excited by a title just to find that I would have to pay for a yearly subscription to a journal in order to read.  Since I have five children and am paying to pursue this degree, I must admit that I limited myself to the available articles.  Below please find the link to my work.

Annotated Bibliography

RSS in Education

So there is definitely a learning curve with screencasting.  I had to try it several times, in order to create a fluid product.  It was also hard to keep hearing my own voice (ugh.)  But the possibilities for the classroom of having these screencast artifacts is amazing; students who struggle with certain concepts would definitely benefit from having a YouTube channel full of specific tutorials.

I must admit that I never really paid attention to RSS feeds before, despite the amount of time I spend on the internet.  I thought they were automatic and provided by the web browser.  Quite the learning curve for me on this particular topic!  Once I understood what the streaming possibilities were, I got very excited by the applications in my high school mathematics classroom.  Since my personal philosophy of teaching math is one of encouraging students to see math as a way of understanding the world around them, the RSS feed provides a great opportunity to do just that.

Exploring RSS feeds also made me engage with the possibility of Twitter as an educational tool, which is DEFINITELY an idea I never considered previously.  So much of what is entertainment or pop culture can be reconfigured as a classroom tool -- that's one of the most prominent themes of this program for me so far.  I look forward to going even further in the process of noticing, of paying attention to something that I previously took for granted and finding ways to use it in the classroom.

Elements of Educational Technology

501: Introduction to Educational Technology

3.4 Policies and Regulations

So thinking about educational technology apparently gets me all hot and bothered.  As I was reading this article and reflecting on the notion of "facilitating" I kept thinking about issues in the classroom.  I love the shift to student ownership of learning and progress.  I love inquiry - based learning.  What I don't love is figuring out how assessment works and how these much more unique assignments and progressions work in an educational world that has become so so focused on "data."
I'm not saying that great use of educational technology or inquiry-based learning doesn't produce data.
In my experience, the standardized testing frenzy has gotten in the way of my units, my instructional time and the format of my own classroom assessments when my principal wants us to format  everything exactly like the TCAPs (the Colorado state standardized tests that last year were called the CSAPs and next year will be called something else all together.)  I love the idea that this in-flux definition of educational technology relies upon notions that I hold dear -- that problem solving skills are more important that fixed sets of information.  That's what so exciting about technology as tool for students to use, to create with, to explore by way of.
Sorry to rant!  That's what happens when I analyze education! This first week has been intimidating (Google plus and the Blogger are, as one my classmates said, not intuitive) but exciting.  Reading about what true educational technology means makes me very glad to have chosen to pursue it.

Here goes:
Elements of Educational Technology

Welcome

Hey! My first blog! I believe the purpose of this is exactly what I first titled it: Learning. I guess it'll evolve over time as I figure what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. I've been teaching a class for seniors for 8 years now that I've slowly changed into a technology-based math class that focuses on the math/numbers/money that the students will be facing in the next 5-10 years of their lives. It's been very successful, and has won several awards and grants! Here's a video I made that won an award through the Council for Economic Education (it also details fairly well how I am as a teacher):

Good fun making that in a parking lot in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

My desire to get this degree comes from my desire to make technology a practical tool for students.  I want math to cease to be an abstraction for my students and to be something that informs their life decisions.  Although I have iPads in the classroom funded by grants, I know that I can do more with them as tools for students to demonstrate mastery and for us to share/collaborate/create.  I'm excited by the possibilities but at times overwhelmed by the technological details.

I live in sunny Colorado with my wife and 5 children.  When not teaching full time or pursing this degree, I love trivia competitions and Miami sports.