top ten rules for educational technology and other things
_____________________________________________________________________
… or, All I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Ed Tech Classes
by Mary Anna Thornton
1. Keep it simple.
2. Test it, more than once.
3. To create a compelling experience, take a few risks.
4. Make it meaningful by connecting it to their world, not yours.
5. Take turns; share leadership.
6. It’s not about taking sides; it’s about finding the right balance.
7. Approach technology with confidence.
8. Don’t assume others will.
9. Keep your mind open.
10. Keep your expectations in check.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. Keep It Simple
I’ve known the value of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) rule for years and yet I struggle to adhere to it. My curriculum units tend to mushroom into unmanageability as I add just one more idea … again and again. Over time, I've gotten better at restraining my creative excess. Then I started an educational technology master’s program.
Educational technology is fertile ground for the imagination. In the first few classes, delighted with my new skills, I created extravagantly elaborate projects. Visually stimulating and impressively ambitious, I thought. Overwhelming and unnecessarily convoluted, my classmates politely suggested.
For example, my StaIR (Stand-alone Instructional Resource) project for CEP 811, Adapting Innovative Technology to Education, contained over one hundred slides, each packed with colors, text, buttons, and cartoon dinosaurs that jumped and roared. After completing it, I saw that it might be a bit busy. When I tried it out on students, they responded with bewilderment. Clearly, it was more than just busy – it was far too complex to be a useful learning tool.
This experience cemented for me the idea that simplicity is critical in educational technology.
2. Test it, more than once.
Our readings in CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design, emphasized the importance of user testing. We were required to build a website and then have users test it, while we observed their reactions. This experience was extraordinarily enlightening. My test users were stumped by aspects of navigation that I thought obvious, yet they loved aspects of the site that I thought questionable. I made many improvements in my website as a result, and I suddenly knew exactly why some of my previous projects hadn’t gone over all that well with my students – I had never tested them.
3. To create a compelling experience, take a few risks.
CEP 806, Learning Science through Technology, could have been called “Creating Compelling Learning Experiences,” as many of our projects focused on this concept. I learned from this course to describe outstanding teaching as “compelling." Now just about my favorite word, "compelling" captures that je ne sais quoi about certain learning experiences that takes them beyond just a good lesson and makes them captivating, life-changing experiences.
Creating compelling experiences is difficult, and, since doing so was the focus of CEP 806, the course was difficult. I found our project instructions maddening. They suggested an absurdly high level of performance, I thought, and an unattainable mix of the pedantic and the entertaining. For example, after conducting a number of scientific activities with partners, we were instructed to dramatize our insights in a video, and, of course, make it compelling. An excerpt from the instructions:
“… the tone should be similar to a gripping story. Be dramatic, but make the drama come from the inquiry itself rather than something added. Be thoughtful and careful, but also be natural and yourself …Vivid details make any story come alive. Let your personality, your style come through!”
I think of my personality -- my style -- as low-key and quiet, not vivid or flamboyant. To make anything really “gripping,” I knew, I would have to kiss goodbye my usual safe classroom persona (think Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter or the uptight headmistress from The School of Rock). Totally out of my comfort zone, I made the video into a CSI-like whodunit and tried to sound like a hard-boiled detective as I narrated it.
To my surprise, I had fun making the video, and my classmates and professor were enthusiastic about it, too. I watched the rest of the videos created by the class and noticed that the straightforward ones that simply chronicled the projects were tedious and almost indistinguishable from one another. By contrast, videos that took creative and unusual approaches, even if the presentation was unpolished, were infinitely more watchable and memorable. This project taught me that taking risks in how I present myself is worth the accompanying discomfort and apprehension -- and can actually be fun.
The website I built on learning disabilities and assistive technology for CEP817, Learning Technology through Design, also taught me the value of taking creative risks. In order to add some punch to my competent, yet routine-looking website, I added to each page edgy art created by dyslexics. I questioned whether the site still looked professional, but, to my surprise, every single test user spontaneously commented, “I really like that art!" as soon as they laid eyes on it.
4. Connect it to their world, not yours.
By using my MAET projects in real-life settings, I learned that it didn’t really matter how exciting and meaningful I found my projects. What mattered was how exciting and meaningful the projects were to their users.
The two projects that taught me this most forcefully were the e-portfolio project in CEP 813, Electronic Portfolios, and the website project in CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design. After learning about usability in the design course, I fervently wished that I had taken it before I had launched e-portfolios at my school.
Conserve School's e-portfolio program is progressing much more slowly than I had hoped. We are privileged at Conserve School to work with cooperative, capable students. They come to our school from all walks of life (we are private, but charge no tuition), thrilled to be leaving their standard schools for a semester to engage intensively in their passion – environmental studies and outdoor activities. Unfortunately, many of our eager students view Conserve School’s e-portfolio requirement as a fly in the ointment, often politely enquiring, “Why would I want to do this? Do I really have to do this?” Or, worse yet, “What will happen if I don’t?”
Even though we – the staff – have worked hard to make the e-portfolios relatively easy to use and meaningful, clearly “meaningful” to us is not “meaningful” to them. All I can say is, if only I had done extensive user testing before launching the e-portfolio program.
5. Take turns; share leadership.
My teaching style has always been directed by the belief that people learn by doing. I believe it's best to give small bits of instruction and then turn students loose to try it themselves, then pause to give another small bit of instruction or feedback, then have students give it another try, and so on.
However, because of my high need for control and my nurturing (perhaps smothering) impulses, I tend to overload students with too much information and advice. The MAET courses helped me see that often it’s better to let students struggle on their own for a time, because struggling with not knowing is a part of making leaps forward in learning.
I learned this insight through my own experience as a student in the MAET program. In some of the MAET courses, I received large amounts of direction and feedback, which I liked. I felt reassured by following explicit directions exactly and valued by the constant positive feedback I received. The problem with this, I came to see after time, was that I wasn’t forced to move out of my areas of expertise and comfort. I am a master at following even extremely complex directions to the letter, and I am absurdly pleased by praise from authority figures, something I regard at this point in life as an embarrassing character flaw. So these courses taught me some new skills but didn’t fundamentally change me.
In retrospect, I see that those courses that annoyed me the most were also the ones that changed me most fundamentally – in which I learned not only skills but also important life lessons. The courses that seemed to give only the most elusive clues about what we were supposed to do, that left me at times feeling entirely on my own with no direction and no feedback, ultimately were of the most use to me, because I had to push myself so hard to learn independently, to depend on my own judgment, and to create what I thought was right, not what the instructor thought was good.
Dr. Mishra (Learning Technology through Design) and Dr. Wong (Learning Science with Technology) win the prize, hands down, for the most enigmatic instruction and economical feedback, and also for the most epiphany-inducing learning experiences. I’m still wondering about the questions and pondering the insights that occurred to me while taking their courses.
This particular insight, that sometimes less is more in education, has important implications for how I conduct myself as a teacher and as a supervisor. I was a fan of self-directed learning before, but not always good at actually conducting myself according to that belief. Now I see even more clearly how important it is for the student to be in the driver's seat and how critical it is for me to resist grabbing the steering wheel. Counter-intuitively, I have to experiment with giving less, or perhaps different, direction and support, not just more, more, more.
6. It’s not about taking sides; it’s about finding the right balance.
One of the controversies we debated in CEP806, Learning Science with Technology, was virtual instruction versus real-world instruction. I chose to focus on frog dissection. Years ago, as a high school principal, I supervised a mad-scientist biology teacher, a former coroner who thought dissection was an indispensable learning tool and who, completely straight-faced, once asked me if the school would purchase a human cadaver for our anatomy class. (When I said "no," she responded, "How about a head??") After years of wrestling with objections from a small but steady stream of students and parents -- which the teacher resisted with single-minded determination -- I welcomed the age of virtual simulations with open arms. So I came into this debate with some biases.
For the assignment, I investigated virtual and real dissections with my middle-school-age son, first watching him manipulate on-line dissections and next handing him scalpels and forceps as he dissected a pickled frog. Despite my bias, these observations made clear to me that both methods had advantages and disadvantages, and neither was obviously better than the other.
I learned from this experience to be careful about looking for absolute right-or-wrong resolutions to educational debates. Often finding the right answer is more likely to be a matter of choosing the right tools for the right time, place, and student. Technology can be used, real-world learning can be used, textbooks can be used, or another approach -- all with good results as long as they're well-suited to the occasion. Polarization over using technology is not a useful way to think about education; both virtual and real experiences are valuable.
7. Approach technology with confidence.
I've learned that nothing in technology is so complicated that you can’t learn it. I developed this viewpoint by observing both myself and my fellow students flail around initially in classes, struggling with misconceptions about new technology. By the end of each course, though, despite our initial clumsy trials, the majority of students were churning out sophisticated products using applications they hadn’t heard of a few months before.
The over-complicated Stand-alone Instructional Resource (StaIR) for CEP811 I described above is a good example of how quickly one can go from incomprehension to skill. Initially, I was completely confused by the instructions on how to make an interactive PowerPoint. I kept looking back over the directions because I was sure I had missed something. Where were the instructions about how to put the buttons in and make them work? My paradigm for PowerPoints didn’t include interactive buttons. Finally, after several days of feeling incompetent, my paradigm shifted and I realized that the buttons were just hyperlinks to other pages. If you lined up the objects on your slides properly, the screen changed so smoothly that it just looked like animation.
Now when I feel overwhelmed by a technology problem, I think of that StaIR project and feel reassured that this difficult problem will in time resolve itself into a minor issue, too.
In addition, engaging in discussion forums in classes with people who were network coordinators and “eavesdropping” on them helping one another and recommending to one another instructional books changed my attitude toward learning technology. Realizing that there were all sorts of young, inexperienced network coordinators out there who were making changes in server settings following step-by-step directions in books, for the first time, and apparently not blowing their schools up by accident, was encouraging. Knowing this made me bold enough to start monkeying around myself with html codes and other aspects of technology I didn’t fully understand.
8. Don’t assume others will (approach technology with confidence).
Every time I took a product I had created in a course and used it on real students, they always showed more apprehension than I expected, and they always needed more help than I thought they would. So now I plan on this happening, and provide for more instruction and support than I think necessary. I also plan to deliver it in a differentiated manner, so people can pick and choose the support they need or ignore it altogether.
One caveat: people can learn technology independently and amazingly quickly if you make the experience meaningful and compelling enough. So if you manage to do #3 and #4 really well (and, even better, do lots of user testing as covered in #2), then this rule becomes less important.
9. Keep your mind open.
Before taking these classes, I was one of those English teachers who told students they could absolutely not use Wikipedia for research papers. I feared that Facebook and other social networking applications were ruining young minds, and I thought the idea of using cell phones as learning tools was absurd.
This program taught me not to dismiss any innovation out of hand. Some illustrations:
1) Our Learning Science through Technology course was run on Facebook – smoothly and successfully -- and I often accessed the course on my Droid.
2) Our school blog, one of my MAET projects, has become wildly popular with parents.
3) I learned to start research with Wikipedia – a great source for getting a grip on a subject you know nothing about – and move on to more scholarly and reliable sources once I’m oriented to the subject.
Now I know that it’s foolish to react to technology innovations as though they’re going to destroy the world as we know it. It’s just a matter of becoming familiar with them, learning how they can be useful, avoiding mis-use, and adjusting teaching to take them into account. For example, instead of banning Wikipedia, we should teach students how to make use of it properly.
10. Keep your expectations in check.
So I’ve learned that it’s silly to fear or condemn new technology. On the other hand, I’ve learned that it’s just as silly to imagine that new technology is going to suddenly make anything about education ultra-easy.
The frog dissection experiment helped me see that new technology is unlikely to completely eclipse older teaching methods. I had gone into it fully expecting virtual dissection to be the clear winner over real dissection. Watching my son delightedly flip virtual frogs and delve into their innards onscreen made me feel vindicated – until I saw how much more the real thing engaged him.
E-portfolios have been another reality dose for me. I think they’re fabulous and I’m not giving up on them anytime soon. But they’re hard work, and so far, most of our students don’t see their value.
In Conclusion: All Ten Points Rolled into One
The MAET program demystified educational technology for me. Even though I felt I had some talent in the area, technology felt intimidating to me before I started the program, and I had limited aspirations for improvement. I imagined that really sophisticated technology would always be beyond me. As a result of learning and applying such a broad array of educational technology applications and techniques during my three years in the MAET program, I now understand that any reasonably intelligent and educated person can become a sophisticated techology user. The "rules" one needs to follow to become proficient in technology parallel the familiar "rules" that are necessary to excel in any area: keep an open mind, be patient with others, strive for simplicity, appreciate multiple perspectives rather than polarized positions, be willing to follow as well as lead, maintain a confident attitude, avoid being overly controlling, and so on.
That's why I entitled this essay, Top Ten Rules for Educational Technology and Other Things. I've learned that there's nothing new under the sun: even though technology can seem futuristic and complex, it's not so different from anything else in the human experience. Teachers and students everywhere should be able to make excellent use of it, if they approach it with level heads and use the basic "golden rules" of good work habits that we're all familiar with. This realization has been truly empowering for me, not just in the area of technology, but in other areas of my life as well. It's encouraged me to approach new and perhaps initially daunting opportunities with confidence, by helping me recognize that, at this point in my life, the habits and character traits necessary for success have become second nature to me. The MAET experience has helped me raise my expectations for my "Life 2.0", after 50, by reminding me of my capability. Although I may not be able to run as fast as my younger colleagues, I can still keep up with them, and then some, in the professional and academic arena. I am leaving the MAET program feeling confident in my abilities, delighted with my new technology skills, and excited about using and improving these skills as I continue on to new challenges.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The courses that I remember the best, and that I featured in this paper, are:
CEP 813, Electronic Portfolios
CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design
CEP806, Learning Science with Technology
CEP811, Adapting Innovative Technology to Education
_____________________________________________________________________
… or, All I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Ed Tech Classes
by Mary Anna Thornton
1. Keep it simple.
2. Test it, more than once.
3. To create a compelling experience, take a few risks.
4. Make it meaningful by connecting it to their world, not yours.
5. Take turns; share leadership.
6. It’s not about taking sides; it’s about finding the right balance.
7. Approach technology with confidence.
8. Don’t assume others will.
9. Keep your mind open.
10. Keep your expectations in check.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. Keep It Simple
I’ve known the value of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) rule for years and yet I struggle to adhere to it. My curriculum units tend to mushroom into unmanageability as I add just one more idea … again and again. Over time, I've gotten better at restraining my creative excess. Then I started an educational technology master’s program.
Educational technology is fertile ground for the imagination. In the first few classes, delighted with my new skills, I created extravagantly elaborate projects. Visually stimulating and impressively ambitious, I thought. Overwhelming and unnecessarily convoluted, my classmates politely suggested.
For example, my StaIR (Stand-alone Instructional Resource) project for CEP 811, Adapting Innovative Technology to Education, contained over one hundred slides, each packed with colors, text, buttons, and cartoon dinosaurs that jumped and roared. After completing it, I saw that it might be a bit busy. When I tried it out on students, they responded with bewilderment. Clearly, it was more than just busy – it was far too complex to be a useful learning tool.
This experience cemented for me the idea that simplicity is critical in educational technology.
2. Test it, more than once.
Our readings in CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design, emphasized the importance of user testing. We were required to build a website and then have users test it, while we observed their reactions. This experience was extraordinarily enlightening. My test users were stumped by aspects of navigation that I thought obvious, yet they loved aspects of the site that I thought questionable. I made many improvements in my website as a result, and I suddenly knew exactly why some of my previous projects hadn’t gone over all that well with my students – I had never tested them.
3. To create a compelling experience, take a few risks.
CEP 806, Learning Science through Technology, could have been called “Creating Compelling Learning Experiences,” as many of our projects focused on this concept. I learned from this course to describe outstanding teaching as “compelling." Now just about my favorite word, "compelling" captures that je ne sais quoi about certain learning experiences that takes them beyond just a good lesson and makes them captivating, life-changing experiences.
Creating compelling experiences is difficult, and, since doing so was the focus of CEP 806, the course was difficult. I found our project instructions maddening. They suggested an absurdly high level of performance, I thought, and an unattainable mix of the pedantic and the entertaining. For example, after conducting a number of scientific activities with partners, we were instructed to dramatize our insights in a video, and, of course, make it compelling. An excerpt from the instructions:
“… the tone should be similar to a gripping story. Be dramatic, but make the drama come from the inquiry itself rather than something added. Be thoughtful and careful, but also be natural and yourself …Vivid details make any story come alive. Let your personality, your style come through!”
I think of my personality -- my style -- as low-key and quiet, not vivid or flamboyant. To make anything really “gripping,” I knew, I would have to kiss goodbye my usual safe classroom persona (think Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter or the uptight headmistress from The School of Rock). Totally out of my comfort zone, I made the video into a CSI-like whodunit and tried to sound like a hard-boiled detective as I narrated it.
To my surprise, I had fun making the video, and my classmates and professor were enthusiastic about it, too. I watched the rest of the videos created by the class and noticed that the straightforward ones that simply chronicled the projects were tedious and almost indistinguishable from one another. By contrast, videos that took creative and unusual approaches, even if the presentation was unpolished, were infinitely more watchable and memorable. This project taught me that taking risks in how I present myself is worth the accompanying discomfort and apprehension -- and can actually be fun.
The website I built on learning disabilities and assistive technology for CEP817, Learning Technology through Design, also taught me the value of taking creative risks. In order to add some punch to my competent, yet routine-looking website, I added to each page edgy art created by dyslexics. I questioned whether the site still looked professional, but, to my surprise, every single test user spontaneously commented, “I really like that art!" as soon as they laid eyes on it.
4. Connect it to their world, not yours.
By using my MAET projects in real-life settings, I learned that it didn’t really matter how exciting and meaningful I found my projects. What mattered was how exciting and meaningful the projects were to their users.
The two projects that taught me this most forcefully were the e-portfolio project in CEP 813, Electronic Portfolios, and the website project in CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design. After learning about usability in the design course, I fervently wished that I had taken it before I had launched e-portfolios at my school.
Conserve School's e-portfolio program is progressing much more slowly than I had hoped. We are privileged at Conserve School to work with cooperative, capable students. They come to our school from all walks of life (we are private, but charge no tuition), thrilled to be leaving their standard schools for a semester to engage intensively in their passion – environmental studies and outdoor activities. Unfortunately, many of our eager students view Conserve School’s e-portfolio requirement as a fly in the ointment, often politely enquiring, “Why would I want to do this? Do I really have to do this?” Or, worse yet, “What will happen if I don’t?”
Even though we – the staff – have worked hard to make the e-portfolios relatively easy to use and meaningful, clearly “meaningful” to us is not “meaningful” to them. All I can say is, if only I had done extensive user testing before launching the e-portfolio program.
5. Take turns; share leadership.
My teaching style has always been directed by the belief that people learn by doing. I believe it's best to give small bits of instruction and then turn students loose to try it themselves, then pause to give another small bit of instruction or feedback, then have students give it another try, and so on.
However, because of my high need for control and my nurturing (perhaps smothering) impulses, I tend to overload students with too much information and advice. The MAET courses helped me see that often it’s better to let students struggle on their own for a time, because struggling with not knowing is a part of making leaps forward in learning.
I learned this insight through my own experience as a student in the MAET program. In some of the MAET courses, I received large amounts of direction and feedback, which I liked. I felt reassured by following explicit directions exactly and valued by the constant positive feedback I received. The problem with this, I came to see after time, was that I wasn’t forced to move out of my areas of expertise and comfort. I am a master at following even extremely complex directions to the letter, and I am absurdly pleased by praise from authority figures, something I regard at this point in life as an embarrassing character flaw. So these courses taught me some new skills but didn’t fundamentally change me.
In retrospect, I see that those courses that annoyed me the most were also the ones that changed me most fundamentally – in which I learned not only skills but also important life lessons. The courses that seemed to give only the most elusive clues about what we were supposed to do, that left me at times feeling entirely on my own with no direction and no feedback, ultimately were of the most use to me, because I had to push myself so hard to learn independently, to depend on my own judgment, and to create what I thought was right, not what the instructor thought was good.
Dr. Mishra (Learning Technology through Design) and Dr. Wong (Learning Science with Technology) win the prize, hands down, for the most enigmatic instruction and economical feedback, and also for the most epiphany-inducing learning experiences. I’m still wondering about the questions and pondering the insights that occurred to me while taking their courses.
This particular insight, that sometimes less is more in education, has important implications for how I conduct myself as a teacher and as a supervisor. I was a fan of self-directed learning before, but not always good at actually conducting myself according to that belief. Now I see even more clearly how important it is for the student to be in the driver's seat and how critical it is for me to resist grabbing the steering wheel. Counter-intuitively, I have to experiment with giving less, or perhaps different, direction and support, not just more, more, more.
6. It’s not about taking sides; it’s about finding the right balance.
One of the controversies we debated in CEP806, Learning Science with Technology, was virtual instruction versus real-world instruction. I chose to focus on frog dissection. Years ago, as a high school principal, I supervised a mad-scientist biology teacher, a former coroner who thought dissection was an indispensable learning tool and who, completely straight-faced, once asked me if the school would purchase a human cadaver for our anatomy class. (When I said "no," she responded, "How about a head??") After years of wrestling with objections from a small but steady stream of students and parents -- which the teacher resisted with single-minded determination -- I welcomed the age of virtual simulations with open arms. So I came into this debate with some biases.
For the assignment, I investigated virtual and real dissections with my middle-school-age son, first watching him manipulate on-line dissections and next handing him scalpels and forceps as he dissected a pickled frog. Despite my bias, these observations made clear to me that both methods had advantages and disadvantages, and neither was obviously better than the other.
I learned from this experience to be careful about looking for absolute right-or-wrong resolutions to educational debates. Often finding the right answer is more likely to be a matter of choosing the right tools for the right time, place, and student. Technology can be used, real-world learning can be used, textbooks can be used, or another approach -- all with good results as long as they're well-suited to the occasion. Polarization over using technology is not a useful way to think about education; both virtual and real experiences are valuable.
7. Approach technology with confidence.
I've learned that nothing in technology is so complicated that you can’t learn it. I developed this viewpoint by observing both myself and my fellow students flail around initially in classes, struggling with misconceptions about new technology. By the end of each course, though, despite our initial clumsy trials, the majority of students were churning out sophisticated products using applications they hadn’t heard of a few months before.
The over-complicated Stand-alone Instructional Resource (StaIR) for CEP811 I described above is a good example of how quickly one can go from incomprehension to skill. Initially, I was completely confused by the instructions on how to make an interactive PowerPoint. I kept looking back over the directions because I was sure I had missed something. Where were the instructions about how to put the buttons in and make them work? My paradigm for PowerPoints didn’t include interactive buttons. Finally, after several days of feeling incompetent, my paradigm shifted and I realized that the buttons were just hyperlinks to other pages. If you lined up the objects on your slides properly, the screen changed so smoothly that it just looked like animation.
Now when I feel overwhelmed by a technology problem, I think of that StaIR project and feel reassured that this difficult problem will in time resolve itself into a minor issue, too.
In addition, engaging in discussion forums in classes with people who were network coordinators and “eavesdropping” on them helping one another and recommending to one another instructional books changed my attitude toward learning technology. Realizing that there were all sorts of young, inexperienced network coordinators out there who were making changes in server settings following step-by-step directions in books, for the first time, and apparently not blowing their schools up by accident, was encouraging. Knowing this made me bold enough to start monkeying around myself with html codes and other aspects of technology I didn’t fully understand.
8. Don’t assume others will (approach technology with confidence).
Every time I took a product I had created in a course and used it on real students, they always showed more apprehension than I expected, and they always needed more help than I thought they would. So now I plan on this happening, and provide for more instruction and support than I think necessary. I also plan to deliver it in a differentiated manner, so people can pick and choose the support they need or ignore it altogether.
One caveat: people can learn technology independently and amazingly quickly if you make the experience meaningful and compelling enough. So if you manage to do #3 and #4 really well (and, even better, do lots of user testing as covered in #2), then this rule becomes less important.
9. Keep your mind open.
Before taking these classes, I was one of those English teachers who told students they could absolutely not use Wikipedia for research papers. I feared that Facebook and other social networking applications were ruining young minds, and I thought the idea of using cell phones as learning tools was absurd.
This program taught me not to dismiss any innovation out of hand. Some illustrations:
1) Our Learning Science through Technology course was run on Facebook – smoothly and successfully -- and I often accessed the course on my Droid.
2) Our school blog, one of my MAET projects, has become wildly popular with parents.
3) I learned to start research with Wikipedia – a great source for getting a grip on a subject you know nothing about – and move on to more scholarly and reliable sources once I’m oriented to the subject.
Now I know that it’s foolish to react to technology innovations as though they’re going to destroy the world as we know it. It’s just a matter of becoming familiar with them, learning how they can be useful, avoiding mis-use, and adjusting teaching to take them into account. For example, instead of banning Wikipedia, we should teach students how to make use of it properly.
10. Keep your expectations in check.
So I’ve learned that it’s silly to fear or condemn new technology. On the other hand, I’ve learned that it’s just as silly to imagine that new technology is going to suddenly make anything about education ultra-easy.
The frog dissection experiment helped me see that new technology is unlikely to completely eclipse older teaching methods. I had gone into it fully expecting virtual dissection to be the clear winner over real dissection. Watching my son delightedly flip virtual frogs and delve into their innards onscreen made me feel vindicated – until I saw how much more the real thing engaged him.
E-portfolios have been another reality dose for me. I think they’re fabulous and I’m not giving up on them anytime soon. But they’re hard work, and so far, most of our students don’t see their value.
In Conclusion: All Ten Points Rolled into One
The MAET program demystified educational technology for me. Even though I felt I had some talent in the area, technology felt intimidating to me before I started the program, and I had limited aspirations for improvement. I imagined that really sophisticated technology would always be beyond me. As a result of learning and applying such a broad array of educational technology applications and techniques during my three years in the MAET program, I now understand that any reasonably intelligent and educated person can become a sophisticated techology user. The "rules" one needs to follow to become proficient in technology parallel the familiar "rules" that are necessary to excel in any area: keep an open mind, be patient with others, strive for simplicity, appreciate multiple perspectives rather than polarized positions, be willing to follow as well as lead, maintain a confident attitude, avoid being overly controlling, and so on.
That's why I entitled this essay, Top Ten Rules for Educational Technology and Other Things. I've learned that there's nothing new under the sun: even though technology can seem futuristic and complex, it's not so different from anything else in the human experience. Teachers and students everywhere should be able to make excellent use of it, if they approach it with level heads and use the basic "golden rules" of good work habits that we're all familiar with. This realization has been truly empowering for me, not just in the area of technology, but in other areas of my life as well. It's encouraged me to approach new and perhaps initially daunting opportunities with confidence, by helping me recognize that, at this point in my life, the habits and character traits necessary for success have become second nature to me. The MAET experience has helped me raise my expectations for my "Life 2.0", after 50, by reminding me of my capability. Although I may not be able to run as fast as my younger colleagues, I can still keep up with them, and then some, in the professional and academic arena. I am leaving the MAET program feeling confident in my abilities, delighted with my new technology skills, and excited about using and improving these skills as I continue on to new challenges.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The courses that I remember the best, and that I featured in this paper, are:
CEP 813, Electronic Portfolios
CEP 817, Learning Technology through Design
CEP806, Learning Science with Technology
CEP811, Adapting Innovative Technology to Education