In the article, It’s P.Q. and C.Q. as Much as I.Q., I learned that the world is hyper-connected with innovation and every industry is now being transformed by cheap, fast, connected computing power. This requires the necessity of lifelong learning along with passion and curiosity on my part (Friedman, 2013). A little over two years ago, I decided to use my passion and curiosity to my work as a Program Training Assistant and began a journey into educational technology by taking classes in Michigan State University’s Master of Arts Educational Technology (MAET) program. Throughout this program, I learned that technology enables real-time feedback, allowing us to adjust the pace of the learning, giving learners an opportunity to choose how they want to learn, and creating creators (Culatta, 2013).
Digital technologies have increasingly become a part of the way we work and play and has become center stage in our lives and interactions (Mishra, Koehler, and Henriksen, 2011). In addition to work and play, we use technology to assist with education, and in order to use it productively and effectively, it is important to understand the different ways it can represent content. Three courses in this program really made an impact on me and have inspired me to focus on using formative assessment and digital technologies in Sponsored Program Administration’s (SPA) training program to help encourage play, inquiry, and creativity.
Formative Assessment
Based on my experience in training instruction, assessment has been used to measure comprehension of the materials covered in our Research Administration training sessions. In the Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning course, I learned that it is much more and developed some core beliefs that continue to help me throughout the creation of activities for our training program.
Belief 1: Assessments should provide students with effective feedback and encourage them to move learning forward. I want our students to have a clear understanding of their progress so they can succeed in our training program. "Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, pp. 142-143). By providing the students with effective feedback, our training team can encourage improvement on understanding and create assessments that provide students with guidance on “how to improve while providing assistance and opportunities to work on the improvement” (Black & Wiliam, 1998, p. 144). One way to do this is through electronic assessments or digital technologies. I want to continue focusing on providing feedback to students with technologies such as screen casting, audio recordings, and electronic sources that create a personable experience for both the student and the instructor.
Belief 2: Assessments should identify learning goals and enhance performance. This can be done by reducing discrepancies between the learner’s current understandings, performance, and learning goals. As Black and Wiliam (1998) stated, the ultimate user of feedback, that is used to improve learning, is the student. The assessment should clarify the learning goals and enhance commitment or increased effort from the learner. In order to do so, I will continue to create assessments that provide Feed UP, Feed BACK, and Feed FORWARD to reduce these gaps between actual performance and desired goals. This can be done by creating assessments that address the following questions: “Where am I going?”, “How am I going?”, and “Where to Next?” (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). By answering these three questions, we can help the learner set reasonable goals, track their performance in relation to the learning objectives and their own personal learning goals, and use the feedback to adjust their effort, direction, and strategies as needed. This allows the instructor and student to set further challenging learning goals as the previous ones are attained to establish conditions for ongoing learning. By integrating these three questions, the training team can close the gap between where the learner is and where they are aiming to be (Hattie & Timperley, 2007, pp. 88-90).
Belief 3: Assessments should encourage self-reflection to increase the student’s responsibility in learning. Self-assessment allows students to review and evaluate their abilities, knowledge, and cognitive strategies to self-reflect (Hattie & Timperley, 2007, p. 93). Giving students an opportunity to reflect will increase their responsibility for their own learning (Shepard, 2005). I will continue to work with the instructors to include self-assessment in their curricula that encourages students to identify the main learning goals and explain what needs to be done to achieve these goals. We can then use their responses to provide feedback and redirect their thinking, if needed. A student knows best about his or her understanding, so it is important to give them the opportunity to share their knowledge, reflect on how it affects their learning, and take personal responsibility for their life-long learning.
Maker Movement
In the class, Adapting Innovative Technologies in Education, I learned that learning in the 21st century is being driven by creative and personalized learning. With the increasing demand for technology in learning, one of the challenges that we face as educators is to personalize learning using innovation and standard practices while validating whether these systems actually work. In addition, I learned that everyone is creative, and the maker culture has become a way to express creative and communal drive. This excitement has led to an expansion of makerspaces around the world, including classrooms. The maker movement is revolutionizing education through a set of activities that are designed with a variety of learning goals in mind. These activities are organized by nine key ideas: make, share, give, learn, tool up, play, participate, support, and change. Through the maker movement, anyone can create, innovate, and make while learning content and processes. It engages the intersection of technology, design, art, and engineering while affirming school-based approaches to teaching and learning.
Communities of makers practice in a physical place set up for students to use as a core part of their practice such as a classroom. Students co-participate in a range of activities in a space where they can freely create, innovate and share. Everyone is a maker and the movement continues to engage people in the creative production of artifacts in their daily lives and finds physical and digital forums to share processes and products with others (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014).
The maker movement focuses on problem-solving and digital and physical fabrication and the makerspaces provide the ability to help students learn through play, experimentation, and by constructing knowledge through the act of making something shareable. Makerspaces in our training program will encourage the process of design and making and help students overcome challenges. When the training team starts incorporating a makerspace environment into the progam, learners will start to believe they can solve a problem and learn to trust themselves as problem solvers.
As a training professional, I am usually involved with the logistics for scheduling and setting up rooms for upcoming trainings.
Most of our trainings are lecture based and consist of a classroom style room with the instructor or presenters located at the front of the room. As we move more towards 21st century learning and creating a more personalized and collaborative learning space, I realize that the traditional classroom style does not allow for peer-to-peer collaboration or networking. Taking a more human-centered approach when designing the training room is also very important. It provides a learning space where attendees can develop creative confidence. By placing participants in groups, they can face the fear of being creative and are able to use their teams for problem solving and creative ideas. As Kelley stated, when a person faces his or her fear of being creative, it makes them take small steps to face the fear, this will build their confidence and change their way of thinking about their ideas (2002). By placing attendees in these team centered environments, they will not only build on their skills as team members, but also persuade each other to use critical thinking skills when trying to come up with a solution.
Technology in Professional Development
The class, Teaching for Understanding with Technology, provided me with tools and knowledge to create impactful training for Research Administrators at MSU. I started this class with the belief that learning is a process of taking in new information through instruction and study and mixing it with real-life experiences to build on current knowledge and skills. However, this class taught me that learning is more than just taking in new information, but tools, technology, and critical thinking affect the learners’ understanding. The online world has opened up innovative ways to learn new information, and with all of the unedited content that exists on the Internet, it makes it difficult for learners to distinguish accuracy. As an educator and technology integrator, it is my responsibility to teach learners how to identify valid resources on the web. “Critical thinking skills around information has never been more important” (Richardson, 2012). If I can teach learners how to use these skills, then I will be able to differentiate what information is going to be most effective for them.
The network learning project taught me that the Internet provides us with opportunities to engage in ideas while connecting with others with similar ideas. The behaviors that we develop throughout our learning process is key to our success. In addition, we must organize our thoughts and resources to aid in the learning process. Through practice and research, I was able to identify challenges early on and learn the best techniques through trial and error. A question that I need to ask myself as I continue in educational technology is how can I utilize my professional learning network to ensure that I am using the most effective resources and technology. In conjunction with the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), I can repurpose current tools to fit the needs of my curriculum and learners. After all, as teachers, we need to be equipped with the understanding of the various technologies available and how to incorporate them as pedagogical strategies in the classroom” (Kereluik, Mishra, & Koehler, 2011).
Conclusion
As Marzano (2009) states, “research supports the conclusion that formative classroom assessment is one the most powerful tools a classroom teacher might use.” This whole experience has been an eye opener for me on how effective assessment is in learning. The training team can use many types of digital technologies from quizzes in a CMS to game-based assessments to move learning forward and assess our students. My big “ah-ha moment” is when I realized the importance of using digital technologies as tools for assessment in my creations. This allows me to create a digital portfolio or footprint where students can track their progress towards the goals of the class and self-reflect. The Formative Assessment course was a helpful experience because I feel that it truly has shown me the effectiveness of assessment in teaching and learning.
The MAET program has taught me that I need to continue questioning to yield more effective solutions. This can be done through strength-based questioning. Warren Berger states that “strength-based questioning focuses on what is working in our lives so we can build upon them and get more out of it” (2014). By asking Why, How, and What If questions, I am able to dive deeper into problems presented to me to determine where the real problem lies. As a result, I will continue to work with my training team to redesign the training room to create a more human-centered approach that will not only set the environment for the lesson but persuade collaboration, inquiry, and play. This type of learning space is beneficial for adult training because it can mirror a teamwork environment and bring out the creative side of each and every learner. Technology changes everything – what you teach and how you teach it, and the information I have obtained in the MAET program will continue to direct me as I design upcoming training sessions and eLearning courses around navigation, collaboration, and the use of technology.
Photo Credit: WIX Stock Photos
References
Berger, W. (2014). A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. Bloomsbury Publishin Plc.
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-144.
Culatta, Richard. “Reimagining Learning: Richard Culatta at TEDxBeaconStreet.” YouTube, 10 Jan. 2013, youtu.be/Z0uAuonMXrg
Friedman, T. (2013, Jan 29). It’s P.Q. and C.Q. as Much as I.Q. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/opinion/friedman-its-pq-and-cq-as-much-as-iq.html
Halverson, E.R. & Sheridan, K. (2014). The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 495-465.
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112.
Kelley, D. (2002, Feb). The Future of Design is Human=Centered. Retrieved from TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_on_human_centered_design
Kereluik, K., Mishra, P. & Koehler, M.J. (2011). On learning to subvert signs: Literacy, technology and the TPACK framework. The California Reader, 44(2), 12-18.
Marzano, R. (2009). Classroom assessment and grading that work. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Retrieved from http://p2047-ezproxy.msu.edu.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/login?url=https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=179528&scope=site
Shepard, L. (2005). Linking formative assessment to scaffolding. Educational Leadership, 63(3), 66-70. Retrieved from http://p2047-ezproxy.msu.edu.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/login?url=https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ofs&AN=507839305&scope=site
Sheridan, K. Halverson, E.R., Litts, B.K., Brahms, L, Jacobs-Priebe, L., & Owens, T. (2014) Learning in the making: A comparative case-study of three maker spaces. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4), 505-565.
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