Ann's Annotated Transcript
Here you will find descriptions of the courses I have taken throughout my Masters program at MSU, as well as some examples of the work I have done in them.
TE 804: Reflection and Inquiry in Teaching Practice II
Instructor: Claire Yates
Spring 2010
Connected to my teaching internship year, this course focused on what it means to be a social studies teacher. Working with colleagues who were also experiencing lead-teaching for the first time, this course allowed for a discourse on what the purpose of social studies education is, and how to teach to a broad range of learning needs. We also focused on education policy, and how to apply that to our practice. As I was student-teaching at the same time as I took this course, I found it immensely useful for evaluating and re-evaluating who I was as a novice teacher.
CEP 810: Teaching Understanding With Technology
Instructors: Jodi Spicer, Alison Keller and Craig McMichael
Summer 2012
This was truly my first crash-course experience in the MAET program! As I participated in an accelerated summer program, I completed this course in an intense 2 weeks on-campus with a small group of peers. This was a class designed to allow me to explore technology tools I had never worked with before, and begin the process of understanding the possibilities of technology in the classroom. As I developed a personal learning network, I also learned more about issues such as fair use, affordances and constraints of technology tools, and how to "play" with technology to advance my understanding.
Below you can view my very first assignment for the MAET program--a video explaining what I believe are the connections between education and technology, using the program Animoto.
Below you can view my very first assignment for the MAET program--a video explaining what I believe are the connections between education and technology, using the program Animoto.
CEP 811: Adapting Innovative Technologies in Education
Instructors: Jodi Spicer, Alison Keller and Craig McMichael
Summer 2012
CEP 811, the second intensive summer course I took, delved further into the intricacies of using technologies in the classroom. As such, the course required that I develop an independent, stand-alone online project for students using what I had learned in the course, which you can find below by clicking on the image. I also learned about Universal Design for Learning, which focuses on how to adapt technology features to best reach all students, regardless of learning needs. By viewing web tools and programs through a UDL lens, I am better able now to judge a tool's affordances and constraints for students in my classroom.
CEP 812: Applying Educational Technology to Issues of Practice
Instructors: Jodi Spicer, Alison Keller and Craig McMichael
Summer 2012
The final course in my intensive summer program was all about problem solving. This includes both problem solving issues surrounding technology, as well as how to use technology to solve problems within an educational setting. One focus of the class was to identify a "wicked problem;" something within my school that I wanted to solve through the use of effective technology tools. You can find a link to my blog post about that here. This course played a huge role in developing my confidence as a user of technology in the classroom, and allowed me to truly feel ready to embark on some technology adventures and experiments in my classroom! You can view my final project for this course, a reflection on my experience, below.
CEP 820: Teaching Students Online
Instructors: Anne Heinz, Sean Leahy, Michelle Hagerman
Fall 2012
The overarching goal of this course was to explore different ways of teaching students online, as the title suggests. To do this, much of the work of the course revolved around designing a course management system (CMS) that was unfamiliar to me. As I developed this site, using Haiku, I analyzed my experiences through a developer's notebook that I shared with instructor Michelle Hagerman, who helped me push myself to question and evaluate my choices at every turn in order to create a better learning product.
TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners
Instructor: Jennifer Knight
Spring 2013
Literacy and teaching literacy were the focus of this course, which is a newly required course for Michigan teachers. The focus on literacy was an interesting one after so many courses on technology. I found that I approached literacy with a new viewpoint after looking at it through the lens of technology for so long. I found that many of the same issues are apparent for learning technology and literacy: comprehension, prior knowledge, past experiences and expectations of the learner. In order to better grasp these issues, the class focused on a case study of a student. Through many weeks of working one-on-one with a student using literacy lessons and assessments I developed, I became better equipped to evaluate lessons for literacy pitfalls and benefits, as well as how to appropriately modify and accommodate for my students.
CEP 800: Learning in Schools and Other Settings
Instructors: Leigh Wolf, Heather Klautke, and Sean Leahy
Summer 2013
This course asked me to view my own teaching through the experiences of my students, while also experimenting at a fast pace with some technologies that were very new to me. I also read many articles about the theories and practice of teaching with technology, and then integrated what I learned into lesson plans and activities that I created for my own classroom. I documented my major projects here, so please check them out!
CEP 815: Technology and Leadership
Instructors: Leigh Wolf, Luke Rapa and Joshua Rosenberg
Summer 2013
This course was all about learning what it takes to be a leader in technology, as the title suggests! By viewing technology from the vantage point of leadership, rather than as an individual classroom user, I gained insight into how I could advance my skills in educational technology professionally in my school and district. As this course required me to think less like a teacher and more as a technology leader, I developed skills and a knowledge base that could help me successfully introduce technology-based initiatives in my own school. The course emphasized the TPACK framework, which identifies and analyzes the realms of knowledge a teacher must have to teach successfully with technology. An example of an initiative I designed using the TPACK framework for this course can be found below.
tpack_initiative.pdf | |
File Size: | 82 kb |
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CEP 822: Approaches to Educational Research
Instructor: E. David Wong
Summer 2013
This course looked at education through a research-based lens. This class was unlike any I had ever taken before, as it was statistics-based, using Excel to collect, chart, and analyze data. Although new to me, I found this course very interesting, as it forced me to look at educational data in new ways. Until now, I had taken educational research findings for granted, not particularly concerned with how the data was found. By working to develop my own educational survey and analyze my own results in ways that could tell me more about my personal classroom and students, I learned how to look at research and data with a sharper focus. This skill helped me immediately, as I was better able to analyze testing results for my own students, while also allowing me to develop more critical reading skills when reading up on new policies and ideas in education.
CEP 807: Seminar in Educational Technology (Capstone Portfolio)
Instructors: Matthew Koehler, Andrea Zellner, Joshua Rosenberg, and Spencer Greenhalgh
Fall 2013
As the final course in my MAET program, this course wraps everything up! The goal of this course is to create an online portfolio demonstrating the work I have done throughout my time in the Masters in Educational Technology program here at Michigan State. This website is testament to the work I have done, so please take a look around and check it out!