Goal+9+Technology+-+Tracie

Tracie Weisz EDET698 Masters Portfolio Goal 9 Spring 2014

One of the main reasons I became excited about developing the Alaska TOOLkit was because of my own experiences and growth as a professional due to technology integration in my classrooms. I was always fortunate throughout my career to have made contacts, often by chance, with people who were able to offer me inspiration in this area. I never wanted to be a traditional teacher who commanded the stand and deliver model of education in my classrooms. I always knew that students must first have the motivation and desire to learn, and that second, they must be presented with a good reason for learning it. Making learning authentic and engaging always guided my practice. With that mindset, I found that I was open to new learning and experiences that required me to take some risks. Even if I didn't understand the actual aspect of how something worked, if I could envision an end result and what that might look like, I would take the necessary steps to learn the technology to make it happen. This also allowed me to be open to those nuggets of inspiration when they appeared.

As such, I have tried and succeeded with a great many strategies for technology integration in my classrooms. Although some things have not worked out quite as I planned, I don't necessarily count those as failures. They were learning experiences, and if I felt the end result was still worth the effort, I would usually try again until I could make the technology work in a way that my students found useful. What encouraged me to go on was that I could see my students engaging, and I also saw that time and time again, knowledge of the tools was power for them. It gave them a leg up for new learning - they already had a support or structure for the path they wanted to take for their learning. Through varied and meaningful use of technologies, my students quickly gained an understanding of what real purposeful collaboration looked and felt like, as well as the benefits of creating something new. They knew what tools they could use to support their own learning - technology gave them a path in which they could make complex work possible and digestible. I make a strong point of making sure my students know how to build and maintain powerful platforms like blogs, wikis and websites, and that they use those in conjunction with multimedia tools across content areas and for a variety of purposes. I also ensure that they have ample opportunity to work within collaborative online communities through CMS platforms like Edmodo and other "social" spaces such as Nings, so that they understand the value of collaboration and build communication skills for gaining knowledge and creating new knowledge. My students are also comfortable in moving between home, school, and mobile devices, understanding how the cloud and web-based applications help them to learn, collaborate, and communicate anytime and anywhere.

These are my experiences and how technology has had a transformative effect on my teaching. As a result of my own learning experiences in this sphere, I have always been very transparent about my teaching and my own learning in this area. Besides being the instructional tech coordinator in my school, I've maintained a technology blog for my district for the past 6 years. In the blog, I post ideas about technology integration, tools, and strategies. I get very specific about what works in my classroom and the results I see in my kids. I believe my transparency has helped me to be a better teacher leader in my school, and has allowed me to have a greater impact on the teachers here. I most often have teachers come to me who want ideas for how to use technology in their own classrooms for specific projects, and those who want to collaborate with my technology classes on projects. Now, most of our secondary staff and about half of our elementary staff maintain class blogs or websites. That's something that wasn't happening even five years ago.

I also do quite a bit of curriculum work for the district, and as such, am able to influence much of the curriculum - not with mandated strategies for technology integration, but with careful suggestions and specific options for performance assessments. It is specifically this last piece of work that has happened during the last two years that made me see the possibilities for the Alaska TOOLkit. I have written a great many standards aligned performance assessments that incorporate and integrate technology in ways that are already proven to be successful in classrooms. I could see the possibilities for how this type of work, and the personal experience and knowledge that I bring to this, could be beneficial for teacher learning and development.

The development of the Alaska TOOLkit has allowed me to bring together my experiences with technology integration, my professional interest in instructional strategies for technology integration, my passion for professional development and supporting teachers, and my career goals of impacting classrooms and supporting students to become versatile and innovative adults who are able to adapt and succeed in a rapidly changing world.

ARTIFACTS: Throughout my courses in the EDET program, I have written many posts on technology integration in classrooms. It is the goal and purpose of the Alaska Toolkit. One of the frameworks I have used consistently in my professional practice is Understanding by Design. What I like about the framework is that it starts with planning for a worthwhile outcome that aligns with established standards. Thinking first about the knowledge and behaviors I want my students to have is crucial - it allows me to have a clear picture in your mind about what exactly this will look like. Then working backwards helps me to think about the skills and content we'll have to learn to get there. Most of the performance assessments I've included in the Alaska Toolkit were developed using the UbD framework. Following is an example of a UbD framework I created in EDET 628, Technology in Instructional Design. The plan was to teach students in my Online Entrepreneurship class how to build an effective PLN using social media tools. media type="custom" key="25655588"