Showcase

During my time in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program at Michigan State University, I learned how to thoughtfully integrate technology to help enhance student understanding, and developed the imperative ability to embrace unconventional sources of learning, pursue new technologies and innovations, and seek answers by exploring the unknown. The following artifacts illustrate my competency in these themes, which also serve as guidelines on how I will continue developing as an educator. Click on the video or image to view each exemplar.

EMBRACE THE UNCONVENTIONAL

I used to take a lot of pride in being a logical person. While I still consider being rational a strength, I have found that my greatest lessons learned, both professional and personally, are rooted in experiences which defy the reasoning of a linear path. The unexpected challenges you in ways that logic cannot, fueling creativity, discovery, and growth. The following group of artifacts is a sampling of ways I have explored learning from unconventional sources throughout the MAET program.

Personal Manifesto

My career path, while unconventional compared to most educators, is filled with experiences precipitating continual growth in skills that are imperative for teachers. In this personal manifesto, I identified twelve essential areas of knowledge for both educators and those in my current occupation as a business analyst. For each topic, I provided several resources to help traditional and/or nontraditional educators further their understanding of each theme. This artifact demonstrates not only how skills learned in a nontraditional role are linked to those required by traditional educators, but also the areas in which I continue to pursue future knowledge in order to further my professional growth.

Top 10 Ideas for Educators on the Nature & Design of Compelling Experiences

In creating this video, I reflected on how photography, music, architecture and interior design, and other fields within the arts help educators create more compelling learning experiences for students. By implementing these ideas, teachers can help students better understand, remember, and apply the content area knowledge and skills they are learning, rather than simply dismiss them as facts they are required to know for an assessment.

Architecture & Interior Design Bookstore Comparison

The physical layout and design of a space affects how people feel when they are within it, influencing where they want to walk or sit, their comfort level, and whether they want to stay within or leave the space. In this video, I compared the design of two bookstores, Literati and Aunt Agatha’s, an activity which taught me it is not necessarily the surface-level aesthetics that have the most power in how a space functions (although they certainly have value). Understanding the impact aesthetics and layout have on a space is essential for educators to foster a supportive learning environment in which students feel comfortable enough to take risks.

PURSUE INNOVATION

While educators should not use technology simply for the sake of using technology, they should recognize that innovations allow content to be presented in new ways, which can permit students to comprehend material more fully. Technology also enables new content to be taught, whether as its own end or as a supporting piece for a larger idea or skill. While I, as all educators, must continue to explore and analyze new innovations to enhance learning, the following artifacts demonstrate my ability to repurpose relatively recent technologies for the benefit of students.

Flipped Classroom Video: Gettysburg Address

The innovations of Microsoft PowerPoint, Audacity, Camtasia Studio, and the internet come together in this resource to address the wicked problem of English Language Learners (ELLs) in a secondary social studies class. Not only do the technologies permit the use of the flipped classroom pedagogical method, which enables students to re-watch videos as needed to understand the content, but they also allow the resource to be created with affordances for ELLs in mind. For instance, when creating this video introducing the Gettysburg Address, I spoke slowly and added captions to help meet the learning needs of ELLs.

WebQuest: 1950s Consensus Culture

When designing this activity, I used Weebly, Google Docs, YouTube, and other internet resources to create an opportunity for high school students to explore the culture of the United States in the 1950s in a way that is interactive, contains multiple types of media, and requires analysis. Not only is technology essential to achieving the objectives and characteristics of this lesson, it is imperative in order to maximize students’ understanding of the topic and their ability to apply concepts to the world around them.

StAIR: 1960s Counterculture & Vietnam Self-Review

In this stand-alone instructional resource (StAIR), I repurposed Microsoft PowerPoint to meet my educational objective of creating a self-review guide for high school students to prepare for an exam on the 1960s American counterculture and participation in the war in Vietnam. The hyperlink functionality within PowerPoint allows students to quiz themselves to assess their knowledge, while the inclusion of explanations and hints on the answer slides means the resource helps students expand their content and reasoning skills. In essence, the innovations in PowerPoint allow the design of a review resource that helps teach students without needing a teacher to be physically present.

EXPLORE THE UNKNOWN

Continual professional growth is essential for all educators in order to provide the best instruction and learning environment to students. While some development might be considered inevitable due to years of experience, most will only occur if teachers are intentional in seeking understanding of what they do not know. The following artifacts demonstrate ways I have expanded my professional knowledge during the MAET program, as well represent methods that I can use to continue to mature as an educator in the future.

Understanding Understanding: The Electoral College

In order to help students move forward with their understanding of content knowledge and skills, educators must be aware of the existing knowledge and misconceptions students have about a topic. In this video, I explored what adults know about the Electoral College, looking for patterns in their understanding. While investigating every learner’s understanding about every topic in this amount of depth is not feasible for traditional educators, the practice of developing questions to seek out student knowledge can and should be applied on a regular basis when instructing learners.

Research Review: Project-Based Learning

While I had seen the success of project-based learning on a micro-level prior to enrolling in the MAET program, I did not know if there was sufficient evidence to support using the pedagogical method for entire social studies classes on a regular basis. For this paper, I explored the existing research on project- and problem-based learning as it related to the secondary social studies disciplines. In addition to finding evidence in support of project-based learning, I also developed research skills that will enable me to investigate other topics in the future