Summary

Coming into this course, I wasn't sure what to expect. I know myself to be a digital native, and most of everything I've ran into in terms of technology has been easy for me to master. One of the main takeaways I've realized from this class, however, is that just because you know how to use technology well and can learn it easily, doesn't mean you can use it in your teaching. Implementing technology takes knowing what's out there, collaborating to learn, and designing curriculum around those technologies that creates deep learning, not something that is just a replacement.

Moving through the modules, I learned about Deep Learning, and how to use technology to help my students achieve that. I also learned that, while most of my students will be Digital Natives like me, they'll also need to know the guidelines and rules of the internet, and how to represent themselves on social media professionally. Designing curriculum for them won't be as simple, as technology is constantly evolving and so are the schools and school districts we will be in.

This class has gave me a lasting impression of how technology should be implemented in my future classroom, and the easiest way for me to go about doing it. Using broad standards like the ISTE Standards for Educators, I can gauge how I need to keep my students empowered and learning, while also using the other tools from this class to use technology to reach those goals. I think I'll also be able to implement what I've learned from this COVID-19 pandemic, and what other educators will certainly have thoughts on, to amplify the way we teach students through an online basis.

Module 7 - Educator as Learner

Learning Your Best Way of Teaching, Including Tech Teaching

1. Professional Learning Communities - Also sometimes called Professional Learning Teams, are groups of teachers coming together to collaborate and learn from each other. While it's fairly new, the internet makes it easier for educators to connect and use those connections to aid in their teaching.
2. Tools such as Twitter or creating blogs are great ways to create online PLCs. There are also such things as Personal Learning Networks, which are usually set up my teachers themselves, while PLCs and PLYs are set up my schools or school districts.
3. "Even without connecting to other educators, there are many ways for educators to make the Web a valuable partner in increasing skills and in improving practice. The trick is knowing where to go for quality resources so that time is not wasted wading through volumes of search results or evaluating the credibility of the sources."
4. Lots of wonderful sources exits, including:
1. Youtube
2. ISTE
3. Edudemic
4. TeachThought
5. Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything
5. Along with using these online resources, you can also make the web work for you by using curation tools - ways to search collections and create bookmarks of good ideas and activities.
6. While some teachers get professional development through their school district, others have to look outward to help them learn new skills, particularly in the realm of technology.
7. Some online professional learning options:
1. Apple Teacher
2. Google Certified Educator Training Center
3. ACSD
4. PBS TeacherLine
5. Teachers First
8. You can also improve your own teaching not just by collaborating or learning from others, but also by following and doing your own research. While some may believe in learning styles, some research into the matter can find that Dembo & Howard (2007) found that they are almost a myth.
9. No matter how your school may help its teachers progress professionally, and no matter how the school may me set up technologically, you can know that you'll be prepared to tackle anything that comes at you as an educator.

Module 6 - Designing for Deep Learning

Designing Learning with Technology in Mind

1. The ISTE Designer Standard addresses ways Educators can "design authentic, learner-driven activities and environments that recognize and accommodate learner variability" in its Designer Standard. Educators: 
1. Use technology to create, adapt and personalize learning experiences that foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs.
2. Design authentic learning activities that align with content area standards and use digital tools and resources to maximize active, deep learning.
3. Explore and apply instructional design principles to create innovative digital learning environments that engage and support learning.
2. The Backward Design Approach - setting the final goal for the learning, and building curriculum from that backwards, creating learning activities that work towards that goal.
3. Checking for evidence of learning can help guide students and educators on the right path to their goals. You can use Assessment Plans to formulate how to reach those outcomes.
4. There are also many different kinds of assessments, including:
1. Formative Assessment - assessment during learning, to help guide the process
2. Summative Assessment - assessment after the fact, to help gauge the entire unit
5. After deciding the final goal and how you will assess the students in their completion of that goal, it comes time to decide what activities and tasks will help the student reach those goals.
6. "When planning the activities, consider: 
1. What will be taught and how should it be taught to help learners meet the performance goals?
2. What sequence of activity best suits the desired results?
3. What activities will help making the learning experience engaging and effective, given the goals and needed evidence?
4. What learning events and instruction will help learners acquire the targeted knowledge and skills, make meaning of important ideas and transfer their learning to new situations?"
7. Grant & McTighe recommend using a "WHERETO" approach:
1. Where are We HEaded
2. Hook and Engage
3. Equip for Success with Experiences
4. Reflect, Revisit, Revise, and Rethink
5. Express Understandings and Self-evaluate
6. Tailor
7. Organizing Learning Experiences to Foster Understanding
8. Technology can fit into these processes in many ways, including using the technology to enhance your curriculum-building, and also as learning tools for your student's activities.
9. Keeping these technological tools in mind when designing, assessing, and creating activities can help you enhance your student's learning, but it's good to keep in mind not all technology will help in every situation and simulation.

Module 5 - Facilitating Digital Age Learning

Technological Thinking and Technological Learning

1. While technology can be a great resource to help aid in a student's education, using it incorrectly, or using it when the classroom culture doesn't support it, will never be helpful.
2. You can empower classroom culture in many ways, including:
1. Voice and Choice
2. Promote Trust and Collaboration
3. Foster a Growth Mindset
4. Encourage Risk-Taking
5. Let Students Follow Their Passion
6. Be a Tour Guide, Not a Gatekeeper
3. "CT is a set of critical thinking skills that when used to solve a problem, mirror the processes a computer would use. It relies on algorithms and patterns that can be replicated by computers. "
4. CT can be used in classrooms easily, and it doesn't require technology. It helps students break problems into smaller pieces that they can handle, and can help them in the long run by learning a new learning skill.
5. Design Thinking is another type of problem-solving skill for your students, which involves students designing something to solve a problem.
6. The key principles of Design Thinking are as follows:
1. Divergent Thinking
2. User-Centered
3. Collaborative
4. Integrated Thinking
5. Experimental
7. While Design Thinking doesn't require any technology, it still has implementations with technology in the classroom.
8. "Creative thinking involves generating new ideas, often where there is not one correct answer. Creativity requires individuals to think outside of the box, in directions different from that which might be expected, and it urges individuals to look at what already exists relative to a concept while generating novel ideas. "
9. This Creative thinking can be helpful to students by helping them formulate and create new ideas, to imagine, to take risks, and be curious.
10. Scaffolding, another learning experience, includes giving students the tools and strategies to support higher thinking then they normally could reach without it.

Module 4 - From Digital Citizen to Digital Leader

A New Kind of Citizenship

1. Digital Native - a person born and brought up in the age of technology, who is more familiar with the Internet and the digital age.
2. While most students educators are serving today are these Natives, it is becoming apparent that our students do not have the skills they need to function in this digital world.
3. Many schools create programs to help their students learn digital etiquette, and also limit some students to certain websites and programs. Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) also help limit students and guide their conduct on the web.
4. Digital Citizenship - having acceptable and useful online behavior, void of plagiarism and inappropriate behavior. "Just as we teach our students expectations for behavior and safety in the classroom, the playground, the cafeteria and the school halls, we need to do the same for our digital activities."
5. Anything you do online leaves a Digital Footprint, a trail of personal information and search history that the internet stores. Keeping students informed on what the internet keeps helps them be better Digital Citizens.
6. Students also need to be aware of copyrights and creative credits, to make sure they know not all information is readily available to them, and so they don't violate them in the process.
7. Cyberbullying is also something that students should be informed of - how cyberbullying works, why it can be even more detrimental than regular in-person bullying, and how to combat it.
8. Something that teachers and online educators have to be mindful of, as well as their students, is making sure that we all have a professional online presence, including social media. This is part of our digital footprint, and we have to make sure that what we post or do online doesn't jeopardize future opportunities.
9. Digital Citizenship should be part of a students curriculum from kindergarten on, to make sure that students can go into the new technological world with the skills they need to be successful.

Module 3 - Transforming Collaboration & Communication

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

1. In using technology in our classrooms with our students, we can empower them to learn better, and empower ourselves to teach better. A good way to strive for this is to make sure we implement the ISTE Educator Standards. 
2. These Standards are grouped into two categories -"How teachers can be a catalyst for learning (collaborator, designer, facilitator, analyst) and how teachers can be an empowered professional (learner, leader, citizen)."  
3. Collaboration and communication are also important values to impart to our students, and while sometimes it's difficult to help students collaborate outside their specific subject, it's important in the 21st century to make sure our students are ready for the real world.
4. In terms of the ISTE Standards, there are two collaborative titles:
1. Creative Communicator:  Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.
2. Global Collaborator:  Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.
5. Writing with technology opens up a huge amount of collaboration, in terms of applications like Google Drive, which helps share writing across accounts for everyone to edit and write on the same document.
6. Following the same vein of technological collaboration, creating video and photo projects students work on together help students immerse themselves in the technology for the assignment, while they also collaborate more effectively because of it.
7. More collaborative technology assignments include:
1. Content-building a wiki
2. Communication using Learning Management Systems
3. Collaborative Brainstorming
8. Collaboration is not always the best situation in a classroom - problems can arise and personalities can clash. As an educator, you have to be prepared to be a mediator as well as a leader of the collaboration.
9. These collaborations also don't always have to be just between your students and you. They can also be with the rest of the world: other classrooms, other students, and even experts in fields you want your students to learn.
10. Student collaboration is key in any classroom. Technology enhances that collaboration to a higher level, but doesn't come without its challenges it brings.

Module 2 - Deep Digital Age Learning

Deep Learning, not Just Surface Learning

1. Some technological learning activities look good on the surface, but actually, they require no actual Deep Learning - something that supports knowledge construction and higher order thinking skills.
2. While some substitution methods are acceptable in terms of technological learning, technology can be used in the "transformative deep end".
3. This is a good difference between SAMR and the ISTE Education Standards - SAMR is more focused on the modification the technology is doing, while the ISTE "challenges educators to empower their learners, to "rethink traditional approaches" and to "prepare students to drive their own learning" (Link)
4. Examples of this deeper learning fall into many categories, including Project-based, Inquiry-based, and Cooperative Learning. None of these styles require technology, but incorporating it can change how these styles work.
5. Empowered Learner: Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
6. To make sure we get meaningful learning, while also including technology to prepare students, a good framework to follow from Howland, Jonassen, and Marra has five parts:
1. Active Learning - Manipulative/Observant
2. Intentional Learning - Goal Directed
3. Authentic Learning - Complex/Contextualized
4. Cooperative Learning - Collaborative/Conversational
5. Constructive Learning - Articulative/Reflective
7. Each of these learning styles are unique, and they work together to create that deep learning with technology.