EDTC 6431 - Phase 5: Individual Project Reflection

I am grateful that this individual project offered me the opportunity and the space to reflect on a previously developed student project and consider the intentional augmentations and improvements that thoughtful technology integration could allow. 

Having been a technology and media teacher at the high school level for the first eight years of my career and now transitioning into a new discipline - as I get my MAT and endorsements in history and social studies - I am eager to work with technology integration in the reverse direction. 

That is, I now have the luxury of extant and copious curricula and project ideas that don't require me to digest that day's news and figure out a way to make it meaningful and engaging and technologically relevant for the following day's lesson - as was the case for many years in my online media literacy course - a 12th grade elective. It was exhausting. 

But similarly exhausting was the experience of listening to many colleague from the math, science and English departments solicit my help to try and "incorporate technology" into their regular practice or project based learning assessments. I found thought that their commitment to that integration was often lip service to the "21st century skills" they believed were essential for student growth but were unclear or unwilling to consider how they might actually expand modalities of instruction, independent practice and/or assessment through the thoughtful integration of technology.

I am quite familiar with the ISTE standards and especially the 2007 version that we've operated from in this course. I taught from those along with the early adoption of the social studies and ELA speaking and listening CCSS standards from 2009-16. SAMR however, was new to me and thoughtful and a metered way in which to consider technology integration and applicability within a course, project, unit, warm up, etc. I wish I'd had it to share with my colleagues who instead pined for me to square peg/round hole their existing project and somehow "make it techy."

I think the SAMR framework gave me a deliberate lens to reflect this summer about the 90s POP & POWER Impact trading cards project that Shawn and I designed and allowed me to see the ways we can go further with technology to expand the project, make it more meaningful, create more student ownership and responsibility and promote collaborative research, design and exhibition.  

I believe that a group Google doc for research gathering, references, feedback and the linking and embedding of the trading card Google doc template is critical for organizing evidence. Additionally,  the creation of a group Blogger page to host the final project offers important augmentation to the student deliverables as well as organization of research and the shared digital space where they can work together.

Another major improvement was the intentional design of group roles and working together as a team to differentiate and specialize in the responsibilities and workload. In my personal experience as student and teacher is that group projects are frustrating because there is often opaque instruction of the actual outcome of the work and/or little if any clarity from the teacher about what each person can or should be doing to work together towards that goal.

So although it is not explicitly technology integration, I see the POGIL or Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning framework as interconnected and essential to the success of this project and other group, technology-integrated projects moving forward. Especially as the ease of cloud saved collaborative documents allow for multi-access and real time sharing students are empowered to control for pace and place of their work time and contributions. As such POGIL and other frameworks like it that provide defined roles and responsibilities for group member to build effective, interdependent collaboration and contribution are more necessary.

I am excited for the launch of POGIL at the start of the school year and incorporating it through daily activity as well as the PBL assessments throughout the year. I am eager to share the augmentations and improvements to the 90s Pop & Power Players lesson plan with my mentor teacher. Lastly, I am excited to see how these changes will enhance student learning, engagement within their groups and create a more meaningful opportunity to examine the impacts both then and now of the Pop culture and Political player and events that shaped the world in which they arrived.