Course+Reflections

**EDLD 5306 Concepts of Educational Technology**
The timing of this course could not have been better for me. Our campus had to complete the STaR Chart the month after this course was completed. I've had to complete the STaR Chart for 5 years now and this last year was the first year I understood what the purpose of it was. Previously we were informed that this is another requirement of the state, so please fill out this form. But after studying the Long-Range plan for Texas, the questions on the form began to make since. I could see how the reports developed can help not only Texas but our specific district and campus as well.

The other benefit of this class was reviewing and studying the Technology Application TEKS. I teach a Introduction to Pedagogy at the local community college and one of the topics we cover with the students is TEKS specific to our subject area. It was good to have a review and see new angles of how the TEKS can be applied. For an introduction class this really got me excited to work on the Masters in Technology Leadership because I instantly saw benefits to the course of study.

__**Technology Standard I**__ Educational technology facilitators/leaders demonstrate and in-depth/advanced understanding of technology operations and concepts.

The purpose of this class was to help us gain a deeper understanding and overall picture of the use of technology in the state of Texas. The readings covered studies and research in the technology operations and concepts of different schools.
 * //Rational//**

**EDLD 5333 Leadership for Accountability**
During the course of this Masters work I have had many opportunities to teach peers in a professional development setting. Gaining an understanding of how data can be used to create data driven professional development lessons has been instrumental to my success in teaching these courses. Going through the data and being able to identify areas of strength and areas of weakness helped to develop the plans that would improve those areas of weakness without wasting time on areas that we are already strong at.

Looking at the campus level of strengths and weaknesses also allowed me to see how my personal classes compared to the campus. Was I strong in the same areas and what could I do to improve other areas? I think that by using the skill we discussed in this class helps us to use the data so that changes can be based on objective materials and not subjective ideas. Change can be proven to be needed.

TF-II Educational technology facilitators plan, design, and model effective learning environments and multiple experiences supported by technology. TL-II Educational technology leaders assist by planning, designing, and modeling effective learning environments and experiences supported by technology at the district/state/regional level.
 * __Technology Standard II__**

Using data as a basis of change for allows for effective change instead of just something different. The data shows what environments and experiences work and do not work so that different experiences can be had by the participants. This allows for multiple experiences that will increase the learning of all involved.
 * //Rational//**

**EDLD 5362 Information Systems Management**
Managing information systems take more than just ensuring that all systems are up and running. There must also be a vision and plan of where you want your technology systems to go. Without planning and vision the current systems will soon be outdated and inadequate. The readings and assignments in EDLD 5362 helped me to understand how school districts make these plans and what these plans are.

I often wondered how districts choose what technologies to use and what would be most effective, for example as Moore (2006) said “Good-to-great organizations avoid technology fads and bandwagons, yet they become pioneers in the application of carefully selected technologies." Looking more into what the goals of the district are I can see how the technologies chosen align with the goals of the district. The foresight of the plan helps to serve for the present and for the future.

Talking with others in the school about some of the technology we use has given me some insight into what other feel. One of the common ideas is that the technology is nice, but it is a pain having a web filter that blocks not only the students, but also the teachers. One of the points made by a member of the technology department is that it is necessary to help prevent embarrassing situations that could cause damage to the district’s image. Careless (2007) agreed and put it this way, “For staff, Web filters prevent access to inappropriate sites that could not only interfere with their jobs, but might also cause considerable embarrassment to their employers should such surfing become public knowledge.”

__**Technology Standard VIII**__ - Leadership and Vision //**Rational**// There is not much rational to point out other than this class goes right in line with what Williamson (2009) said, "Educational technology facilitators will contribute to the shared vision for campus integration of technology and foster an environment and culture conducive to the realization of the vision."

**EDLD 5364 Teaching with Technology**
One of the out comes was learning about how to work with technology for all student levels. Learning about this is extremely relevant to what I do in my work currently. I teach computer science to all levels in the high school, so that means that I have to work with students ranging from 9th grade to 12th grade. This year as well I have 3 special ed students in my classes. So learning use technology with all different levels is needed very much this year. One of the things I have tried in my class is using online tutorials to let more advanced student go ahead, while provided step-by-step guides for those students that work at a slower pace. This was and is an effective tool but is one that cannot be used too often. Much like other tools if it is overused, the students start forget the effectiveness of it.

I learned a few things about myself while doing this course. In my group, I was the group leader. This provided an opportunity to set thing up and ensure that the group corroboration was successful. I found that it is much easier to be a leader of a group that wants to be together. I have had opportunities in the past to be part of groups that do not want to be together and when this happens; you spend more time “putting out fires” than you do of actually doing work. I think there is a time and a place to learn about putting out fires and a time to learn about leading a good group. When doing group assessments of learning I think there should be a certain amount of allowance in the students picking the groups so that they can focus more on demonstrating their learning instead of how their groups are working together.

__**Technology Standard III**__ - Teaching, Learning, and the Curriculum //**Rational**// Throughout this class we developed lesson plans that followed the UDL lesson plans. This would not be possible without "implementing curriculum plans that include methods and strategies for utilizing technology" (Williamson 2009).

Reflection coming after I take the class :D
 * EDLD 5368 Instructional Design**

**EDLD 5366 Digital Graphics, Animation and Desktop Publishing**
This course was a difficult course for many reasons, but that is a great quality of a class. By being difficult it allowed me to understand how students might feel in a class that they are not good at, or how teachers might feel when learning a new subject.

The hardest part about this class was that I felt that the instructors were speaking a new language, but I was never taught the language! There were discussions going on about topics that I felt were not explained or about knowledge that was expected to be understood but was not there. This we good for me to evaluate and understand because as facilitators we often will not be talking to people that are “tech savvy”. They will be regular teachers that may or may not have any desire to use technology in their classroom. It is important that we do not use the foreign language of technology when we are teaching professional development classes. We need to model and use technology, but ensure that we teach it simply.

Another difficult part of the class was learning new software. We were required to make a newsletter. I decided to use In Design, but previously had never used it. So along with learning the material for the class I also had to learn some new software. This also was a good experience and reminder of what teachers go through when facilitators expect them to use new technology in their classroom. We have to remember that they still have to teach a class, lesson plan, and deal with students. There is a lot going on and learning new software is just one more thing to add to the list. Tutorials and simple instructions can go a long way in helping teachers to feel more secure in their technology integration.

//**Rational**// I feel that this class was focus to help us know and understand tools that can increase our productivity and professional Practice. By learning about these tools and using throughout the class I am not better equipped to help others in my school and to provide meaningful professional development trainings.
 * Technology Standard V** - Productivity and Professional Practice

Embedded Assignments


=**EDLD 5363 Video Technology and Multimedia**=

I envisioned for the course that we would spent time developing multimedia presentations and that I would increase my skills with different photo/video editing software. While I did achieve those things, the greater outcome that I received was an increased understanding of how to collaborate with my peers in developing a project and completing it according to a time line. I found that working with the others in my group was an enjoyable event. In addition, when a group is together that is motivated much is accomplished. We were able to work well together because we all had the same vision of what we wanted to accomplish, the method that we all saw of getting there may have been slightly different, but we were all willing to give and take some so that the overall goal could be accomplished.

The outcomes of this course are very relevant to my course work. I am in a field that there is only one teacher per school for what I do. That means that I have to spend a lot of time collaborating with the other teachers at the other campuses online. We cannot just walk down the hall and discuss different things. Since my class is also in a computer lab, we have an opportunity to develop many different multimedia assignments that can be used. One that I am planning to do next year is having students us Camtasia to develop a video tutorial of something we do in class. That way they can help to share what they learn with others. I also plan on developing some make up lessons so that the students that miss class will be able to catch up on their own time.

One of the performance outcomes that I did not achieve was participate in an optional web conference. One of the major reasons I did not do it was because of the word “optional”. I have a hard time doing extra work when it is not required. The reason is that I am doing a full time job along with caring for my family (which is also a full time job). So putting those two things together makes it hard for me to make time for optional events. Most of my schoolwork is done between the hours of 10pm and Midnight! Therefore, as you can imagine 5:00pm is not a real good time for me to leave the family and hide out in the computer room. I think it would have been a good experience to participate, and I will make a greater effort next time there is an opportunity.

I feel that I was successful in the course assignments. One of the things that I think helped the most was being proactive in getting a group together. The first day I saw that we were going to need to get into groups, so I set up my wiki to facilitate that. By setting it up first, it allowed for others that were ready to do the work to come together. It provided and atmosphere of community and union that is hard to achieve through the provided course software. This was also great because it allowed me to interact with others in the group. I noticed that when I started reading the discussion board that I knew some of the people that were posting. It allowed me to understand more about why those people were posting the way they were.

One of the greatest things I learned from this course was more about collaboration. I had an opportunity to work with others in education and to see the things that I put my students through. I have them do group projects at different times of the year and now I can understand a little more about what they feel. As far as leadership skills, our group worked well together because we could openly discuss different ideas, and then when it was time to make a decision some one would step up and make it. It was not always the same person, but we were always willing to accept what others had to say and then work with it. No one wanted to be the “slacker” so we all worked hard and this in turn helped us all to have a good attitude about what we were doing. The result of our work can easily be seen in our final product.

**Week 1 Assignment - Standards I and V** media type="youtube" key="Nybak0-K2ss" height="385" width="480" The personal digital story was a great opportunity to explore new technologies that I have not used before, such as PhotoStory. It also allowed me to work on scripting and other storyboarding techniques. This fits right in with an advanced understanding of technology operations and concepts (standard I) and design, develop, evaluate, and model products created using technology resources to improve and enhance their productivity and professional practice (standard V).

media type="youtube" key="jeeg_fsInMo" height="385" width="480" Week 2 assignment was to develop a short video production, but it was non-graded and used as a practice in preparation for the following three weeks. This was a group project that allowed us to work together to develop a PSA video. This required a lot of working together for scripting, research of the topic, developing the plan of delivering the materials, and modeling professional practice of the technology in use.
 * Assignment 2 through 5 Assignments – Standards I, II, III, and V**

=**EDLD 5365 Web Design**=

This class was an interesting class because of the desired outcome and the actual outcomes were very different. Even with the differences I still learned the principles that were supposed to be taught. We were to work with a web hosting company to develop our own site and to upload documents and videos to it. The site was very poorly set up to handle the amount of hosting required for everyone going through the course. We were supposed to see a good example of how a hosting company can help the school, but instead we saw a poor example. But this example did teach us how important it is to evaluate and test out technology before it is implemented main stream in an educational setting.

This assignment it was essential to understand the implication of technology in education. We had to develop our web policy, which covers all of the social, ethical, legal, and human issues surrounding technology in the P-12 environment. Failure to recognize any issues would result in an ineffective web policy.
 * Assignment 1 – Standard VI**
 * [] **

This was a research and report assignment that needed us to evaluate what the web standards are in websites. We had to develop a plan that would benefit our site that we were developing for the class. This needed and understand of the social and ethical issues of students using the site.
 * Assignment 2 – Standards I, II, III, VI**

This assignment allowed me to research the current school website and view it from an objective view. Looking at what information is provided and how it works together. Also I was required to look at the social and ethical issues around the website and write up a memo requesting additional development in the site.
 * Assignment 3 – Standards I, II, VI**

This assignment allowed me to work though many of the technology standards because of what was involved. I had to research ideas and practices develop technology lessons, post them to a web hosting site, and many other activities that develop skills. For a complete list of how they fit in will all of the standards look at the embedded assignment link above.
 * Assignment 4 – Standards I, II, III, V, VI**

@http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgv2bxmw_11fbxfppgb This was an interesting assignment because it was not what was originally assigned. There was much difficulty in the previous four assignments because of the web hosting company. Therefore, our assignment changed and allowed us to evaluate and reflect on what could have gone better and at the same time make recommendations that would help.
 * Assignment 5 – Standard VI**

=**EDLD 5368 Instructional Design**=

The students that we teach today are much different than the students I was teaching when I first began in education. One of the main differences between the students is the amount of technology the students use and the amount of information they have available to them. Online information is available to anyone that is willing to become “plugged in”. Because most students now use the internet as a normal form of communication I believe that we as educators need to begin developing courses that use the medium that the students like to use. I think that if we were able to create classes that students could access when and where they wanted that they would be more interactive with the courses. We need to be able to develop our courses in a way that the students want to log in and learn. In order to be able to accomplish this we need to follow what Wiggins (2000, p. 11) says about “rethink[ing] many time-honored habits about curriculum, assessment, and instruction”. The course I designed using schoology was a great opportunity to rethink the way in which I teach. The only problem I have with schoology is that it is not accepted in the district that I teach in. I would either need to make a presentation about it and try to get it as an approved source for storing curriculum or transfer my information to the online tools we already have implemented in our district. Honestly I will most likely transfer the information to the tools we already have in place because it will simplify matters and it will make the administration happy because I am using the tools we have. I am lucky that our district is very conscious of the online tools that are available works hard at providing tools to help us out. Schoology help to show what other options are available, but what we currently use in our district can be adapted to do almost the same thing. Using these adaptations will allow me to work on developing more online units. Currently I am working on developing online tools to help in some of my classes so that students can have access to help at all times of the day. After looking at the materials in this class I now want to further my online presence so that students not only can find help, but that they will also be able to continue their learning on their own. Since I teach programming, there are lots of online tutorials and helps that the students can already find, but many of them are not simple enough for the average student to use. I would like to start collecting and building a course that could help the average student to learn on their own. This will require a lot of development and work, but by using backwards design I believe it will be possible.

__**Technology Standards Covered:**__ This course and assignments covered all of the technology standards. But I would like to focus on two of the standards - namely IV and VII.

__**Standard IV:**__ The reason I would like to focus on this standard is because as I was developing my online course I had to continually think about the assessment and evaluations I would like to use with my students. As I was focusing on my backwards design I first decided what I wanted the students to learn, and then I would develop what assessment or evaluation would help me to know if the students had learned what I desired them to learn. Knowing the effective evaluations and assessments to use were essential to developing a productive online course.

This standard focuses on the procedures, policies, planning, and budgeting for technology environments. While working with schoology I also looked at the possibilities of using this web 2.0 technology for my classes. I had to look at what budgeting would be required along with and policies or procedures that would need to change in the school for the implementation of the new technology. A lot of planning would be required not only for the new teaching platform, but also for the change of the lesson plans currently in use.
 * __Standard VII:__**