My Year of Growth and Discovery
After graduating with my undergraduate degree, I knew that I eventually wanted to receive a master’s degree. While one of the main drivers was the financial benefit, I also knew that I had room to grow and wanted to continue my education. Once I felt I had a solid foundation on my career, I started looking into my next step. Choosing a master’s program was not difficult. I knew I wanted to attend Michigan State University (MSU), as it is my alma mater, but I also was interested in MSU because of its Master of Arts in Educational Technology program (MAET), which is ultimately what I chose. I have always been interested in technology, and both schools that I have worked at have one to one Chromebooks for their students, making the program a great fit for me. I wanted to discover new technology resources that I could bring into the classroom and seamlessly bring them into my lessons. Also, a friend of mine had recently been through the program herself and only had good things to say.
Now, my time in this program is coming to an end. I have done a great amount of work in a short amount of time, as I only began this program less than a year ago. As I have learned throughout my courses, reflection is a large part of education. In this past year, I have created many new educational artifacts, such as infographics and videos, and explored many new ideas. I have become more creative and tried many new things that I believe I can use in my own classroom. Of my courses, I have selected three that have been the most impactful. While my courses have had common themes, I have learned something unique in each of them.
Debugging Again
One of the first classes I took in this master’s program had one of the biggest influences on me. This class was CEP 824: Programming Concepts K12 Educators, taught by William Marsland. (For reference, CEP stands for Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Special Education). This course is designed to teach the fundamentals of programming to educators, as well as how to teach these fundamentals to others. Now, I am not a computer science teacher, so why would I take this course? I decided to take this course because I really enjoy using computers and learning about them, but I had never done any programming. I had always been curious about coding, and this was my chance to dip my toes into this topic. This course was difficult for me and took a lot of patience, but I found it extremely rewarding. I learned the basics of programming using a website called Scratch, which uses coding blocks to teach the fundamentals. This website is a resource many of my current students use, so I got to explore the interests of my students and learn how to utilize it myself. I am now able to use this website to design fun review games for my students. For example, for this course, I designed a game where different geography terms fall from the top of the screen and users have to sort them into categories. They get points each time they get one correct, and lose points if they get them incorrect. I was able to use my students to test it out and see how it would work first hand in a classroom.
One of the biggest aspects of this course was debugging. Debugging is the term used for looking through code to find mistakes, known as bugs, and fixing them. In coding, you do not do this just once. You constantly look back at the code you are working on and debug. It is easy to make mistakes while coding, and it takes a lot of patience to go back through slowly to identify and fix these mistakes. Sometimes, it takes several tries to fix the problems. While this was useful to make my code work, this lesson stuck with me past this course. It does not matter which class you are in, or what work you are completing, it is always beneficial to review what you are doing and make whatever changes you can to improve your work. It also has made me more aware that there are sometimes multiple solutions to problems. When coding, there are multiple ways you might be able to achieve your goals, which is similar to teaching. Like coding, there are multiple approaches to accomplish a goal in a classroom, and some are more efficient than others.While this course was difficult and at times frustrating, as coding typically is, I stuck by it and persevered. As a teacher, I will always be reflecting on my work and brainstorm ways to improve. Because of this class, I am much more patient and kinder to myself when going through this reflection process. I use my resources when I need help, and try multiple possible solutions until I find the right fit.
A Summer in Europe
I absolutely love travelling, so when I had the opportunity to go to Galway, Ireland for 2 weeks as a part of the MAET program, I jumped at it. We stayed at the University of Galway in their student dorms and took two master’s classes on campus during this time. Each course was one week, which meant that they were accelerated. It was a significant amount of work to do during this short time and time management was crucial. The course that we focused on during the second week here was the next significant impact a course had on me. This course was CEP 822: Approaches to Educational Research, which was taught by Liz Boltz and Christopher Sloan. For this course, we had to explore problems that we have been seeing in education and conduct research on it. Because it was accelerated, it was a shortened version of this, where we had to create a survey and develop a detailed plan for how we would have conducted the research. We also used various academic journals to narrow our topics and learn more about what we were interested in. While this project was useful and taught me a lot about how to best research a topic, this was not what was most impactful about this course. What I found most significant about this course, was the incorporation of feedback from Irish teachers.
As we worked on our research projects, our professors set aside time for a few Irish teachers to come talk to us. They shared their experiences and we discussed the similarities and differences we have been seeing in education. I found these discussions captivating. It was interesting to see what we all were experiencing even though we were an ocean away. As a social studies teacher, it was even more interesting to discuss the differences between our countries politically and how it has been affecting classrooms. These types of discussions are difficult to find, and I really enjoyed having the opportunity to have them. The Irish educators also read through our research plans and gave us feedback. They gave us suggestions on what to focus on and possible routes we could follow. This course changed my approach to feedback. Prior to this, I was more hesitant to ask for help because I was worried of bothering others, but this course showed me how important it is to get opinions from others in general, but also from other perspectives. Now I feel more comfortable asking for feedback from other educators and will seek it out. Working with others is a great way to brainstorm and come up with better solutions.
Beyond this course, spending two weeks in Galway was a fantastic experience. I met great people, tried new food, and enjoyed the environment. Because of this study abroad, I feel like I have grown both as an educator and a person. I became immersed in Irish culture and even tried Irish dancing, which was really getting out of my comfort zone. It is important to learn and appreciate other cultures, especially as a teacher because I have and will continue to have many students of diverse cultural backgrounds. I will always look back at this time fondly.
Incorporating Technology
In several of my courses, I have been given tasks to explore and test out new technological resources. This has been one of my main goals during my master’s program, and I have been able to try many new websites that might be useful in my classroom. My third course that I found to be most influential was CEP 810: Teaching for Understanding with Technology, which was taught by Deborah McHorney. This course stuck out to me because of its focus on using the technology we have tested to create useful lesson plans. We learned about the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK) which focuses on technology, content, and pedagogy and the relationship between them in the classroom. As we learned about this framework, we were tasked to brainstorm various lessons using it. We created rough lesson ideas and considered the benefits and drawbacks of each one to determine which would be the best fit in the classroom. Once we evaluated which would be the most beneficial, we developed full lesson plans. For my lesson, the content I focused on was the 5 Themes of Geography, the pedagogy was small groups, and the technology I used was Padlet.
This course helped connect the technology I had examined in my other courses with the process of brainstorming ideas and developing them into functional lesson plans. This project also adjusted the way I create lesson plans for my classroom in general. I learned how to use the TPACK framework to create well-rounded lessons and also how to analyze the benefits and downsides of these lessons through this viewpoint as well. I felt that this course did a great job of blending many aspects of the MAET program, and I became much more confident in being able to demonstrate how I have grown through my new lessons.
Moving Forward
This semester, I am taking my last master’s course which focuses on reflecting on the work I have completed during the program and combining it into a professional portfolio website. I have enjoyed being able to look through my creations. It has helped me see what I have accomplished and how I have grown as an educator over this past year. Sometimes I often second guess myself and wonder if I am as knowledgeable as I think I am, but being able to break down each course and observe the specific tools and skills I have gained have helped reassure me that I have worked hard this year and am truly earning this degree. During this program, it has felt similar to debugging while coding: I am always self reflecting, learning new ways to accomplish my goals, constant revisions, and at times frustrating, but the end result is well worth it.
Coming into this program, I had many goals, but my main, overarching goals were to broaden my technology toolbox and be able to use those tools in my own classroom. Through this program I have become more explorative and curious about different ways I can utilize technology, and I have already begun to use some of the lessons that I have designed for my courses in my 6th grade classroom. I have grown so much as both an educator and an individual, and I am excited to continue to grow throughout my time as a teacher.