SPRING 2018
Instructors
Dr. Matthew Koehler
Brittany Dillman
Spencer Greenhalgh
Sarah Keenan-Lechel
Proseminar in Educational Technology
The final course in my master’s degree, CEP 807 is centered around a single project: the capstone portfolio. My portfolio tells the story of the learning I’ve completed during my degree. It also details how that learning has resulted in my growth as an educator. The portfolio reveals more about my classroom and my teaching philosophy, showcases artifacts of my work and my students’ work, and offers insight into my experience through three reflective essays.
FALL 2017
Instructors
Dr. Anne Heintz
Bret Staudt Willet
Teaching Students Online
I studied the many facets of successfully designing and conducting an online class. Topics I learned about included the differences between online, blended, and flipped classrooms; the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous and asynchronous learning; the role of assessment in online and blended learning; and how to construct a course and its activities using the principles of Universal Design for Learning. As I was learning about each topic, I was also building my own online course. I created a music criticism unit for an art workshop titled The Art of Criticism.
Instructor
Bill Marsland
Technology, Teaching, and Learning Across the Curriculum
Throughout CEP 816, we kept a steady focus on new media text and tools. Personally, I investigated online collaborative annotations tools and how they can be used to improve students’ motivation. I also studied and put into practice the work of two scholars: Rand Spiro and his work on Advanced Web Exploration, the Wide-Open Web, and learner-initiated, complex, reciprocally adaptive (LICRA) search techniques. I also learned from Henry Jenkins and his work on participatory culture. Another key idea I learned was cognitive load theory and its implications for design. I incorporated many of the course’s lessons into my final project, a redesign of my unit on Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom.
SUMMER 2017
Instructors
Dr. Danah Henriksen Joshua Rosenberg
Approaches to Educational Research
In CEP822, I learned how to interrogate claims about education in order to make more informed decisions. Many of these lessons emerged from reading Daniel T. Willingham's book When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education. The course also emphasized how to ferret out and address student misunderstanding. The course culminated in the Understanding Understanding Research Project. I collaborated with three classmates to investigate the common misunderstanding that our sense of taste is determined by a taste bud map. We presented our findings in a website that includes a video in which we interview people about their understanding of taste, discuss the origins of their understanding and misunderstanding, and share how educators can generalize our findings to their classroom.
Instructors
Dr. Danah Henriksen Joshua Rosenberg
Technology and Leadership
I learned about the affordances and drawbacks of diverse technologies during daily tech tips presented by my peers. For my own tech tips, I shared Read&Write for Google Chrome, an extension that supports students with dyslexia, and resources from the Mindset Kit, a set of tools compiled by the Project for Educational Research that Scales at Stanford University to encourage a growth mindset. We also had the opportunity to play with and consider the possibilities of augmented reality. For the final project, I worked with three classmates to organize and host a webinar titled “Coding and Robotics in the Classroom”. We discussed coding and robotics with three educators and focused our questions on how they implement coding and robotics lessons in a manner that aligns with their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge.
Learning in School and Other Settings
Instructors
Dr. Danah Henriksen Joshua Rosenberg
The course began with an overview of learning theories, including behaviorism and constructivism. We also discussed how to make learning persist based on the ideas in “Teaching That Sticks” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The primary project required me to take the lessons I’d learned and create a presentation for STEAMlab 2017, a one-day workshop for educators hosted in East Lansing, Michigan. I joined two classmates to produce a session on teaching with models across disciplines. During a particularly productive class, we visited the Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology for a series of design exercises that resulted in a more refined presentation. My final challenge was to write a proposal for a dream project, and I focused on a symphoundic poem.
SPRING 2017
Instructors
Diana Campbell
Cui Cheng
Carmen Richardson
Learning Technology by Design
I learned about the Stanford Design School’s five design modes: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. I then guided a project through the design process. My finished project was a digital portfolio template and organization system created using Google apps. At each step in the process, I studied and experimented with the design mode. For example, in my empathize mode, I completed an exercise in seeing an issue from multiple perspectives and used what I learned from the experience to conduct an interview with my 9th grade students about what they would and would not want from a digital portfolio. All my hard work paid off: my school adopted the digital portfolio system this year.
Instructors
Rachelle Galang
Alison Keller
Applying Educational Technology to Issues of Practice
Asking questions is easy; systematically asking productive questions to arrive at new and unexpected answers is hard. This lesson was one of many I learned from reading Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question. I put this lesson into practice when I collaborated with three classmates to use Berger’s method of asking Why?, What If?, and How? to create a best worst solution to the wicked problem of how to make failure as powerful a learning mode as success. We arrived at our imperfect answer by conducting research into interventions like growth mindset strategies, creating and analyzing a survey we shared with our personal learning networks, and locating technologies that support failure as a learning mode. Finally, we organized our findings into individually-produced infographics and a group-constructed website.
FALL 2016
Instructors
Stacey Schuh
Melissa White
Adapting Innovative Technologies in Education
Maker education was the overarching focus in CEP 811. I learned about constructivism and constructionism, the two learning theories that support maker education. I also read research articles detailing how to effectively create a makerspace. Challenged to develop my own maker-inspired lesson, I used a MakeyMakey to build a symphoundic poem and bring maker education into the English classroom. In addition to maker education, I explored increasing personalized learning; redesigning my classroom to decentralize my position and create new opportunities for deep learning; and assessing creativity.
Instructors
Kimberly Powell
Emily Stone
Teaching for Understanding with Technology
In CEP 810, I learned how technology can assist and support novices as they develop into experts ready to engage in 21st century learning. I read about the habits of experts in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000); the authors deconstruct the learning process and offer recommendations for designing a curriculum that is learner-centered. I then experienced my own learner-centered challenge through a networked learning project in which I used online resources to transform my paltry pancake-making skills into some pretty decent flapjacks. Along the way, I discovered the Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework devised by Dr. Matthew Koehler and Dr. Punya Mishra. TPACK dictates technology itself matters less than our ability to play with it, to create with it, and to use it to share our newfound knowledge with the broader world. CEP 810 culminated with a 21st century lesson plan: I designed an in-class activity in which students use a Google doc and GIFs to make a listicle.