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INTRODUCTION
Hello. My name is Cynthia Sarver, and this is the Rationale Paper for my Boise State University Masters of Educational Technology portfolio. The paper is organized around the Association for Education and Communications Technology (AECT)s learning standards for educational and communications and instructional technologies (ECIT). As such, this paper expands upon and annotates the list of artifacts that you will find mapped on the standards matrix of my MET portfolio. For each standard, you will find discussed at least two artifacts that demonstrate my understanding of and competencies in the standard. Happy reading!
Standard 1: Design
Standard 1 pertains to Design, or the ability to demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to design conditions for learning by applying principles of instructional system design, message design, instructional strategies, and learner characteristics (Standards).
Overall, I greatly appreciated spending a semester learning and practicing this process, the systematic and structured nature of which has now is woven into my approach to all instructional design situations. My task in EdTech 512 to build an online course (in which I am presently engaged in doing) has been much easier than 501, given this experiences basis in the ADDIE with which I am already familiar. Seeing the benefits of the ADDIE model, I have also begun using it to help my students (pre- and inservice teachers) to organize instructional design assignments in the courses I teach. This semester, I have adapted the Instructional Strategies and Motivation templates from Davidson-Shivers, G. V. & Rasmussen, K. L. (2006, p. 208 & pp. 230-231) to help my students more systematically design lesson and unit plans. Before my EdTech 503 experience, I usually had students begin at the development phase (as I had also done!), so I am happy to have these tools to help them, just as they have helped me, enrich the learning experiences we design for students.
Concept Map Assignment are examples of my understanding of how important it is to design instruction with specific learners in mind. For the Digital Inequality Assignment, my colleagues and I considered how to plan for technology integration in order best to benefit economically disadvantaged learners by addressing in our plan the ways that this group tended to approach digital learning and tools. And in the Interactive Concept Map that I designed for EdTech 502, the language, discourse, and content I employ, are all chosen with the adult learners who populate the undergraduate and graduate courses I teach in mind.
Standard 2: Development
Development covers the ability to translate design specifications into print, audiovisual, computer-based and integrated technologies.
readability. The Task Analysis page also follows Lohrs (2003) recommendation for using color and depth of shapes to create meaning for users. And finally, the Essential Questions page follows Lohrs (2003) recommendations for using shape and repetition of shapes to enhance learning.
Los Angeles integrates computer-based instruction with interactive elements such as video, hyperlinks, and a blog that learners engage with after their tour to reflective upon their learning.
Standard 3: Utilization
Utilization is the act of using processes and resources for learning (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 46). This domain involves matching learners with specific materials and activities, preparing learners for interacting with those materials, providing guidance during engagement, providing assessment of the results, and incorporating this usage into the continuing procedures of the organization.
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and Hands-On Pedagogy Unit , does. The plan is written for a subject matter expert (SME) in this case another teacher educator in secondary English -- to implement. To this end, an SMEs feedback was solicited to best ensure that the plan would work. To even further support implementation, an Instructor Guide was included (p. 22), as well as a plan for multiple stages of formative evaluation. I will be implementing the instruction in my course next semester. On the other hand, Institutionalization means integrat[ing] the innovation in the structure and life of the organization (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 47). My Evaluation Project for EdTech 505, Evaluation of the Social Media Integration Program For the UCBHSSPs Summer Institutes, was designed around a project to integrate technology into UC-Berkeleys History and Social Science Projects Summer Institutes. The evaluation studies the effectiveness of those efforts and of several related goals; I am currently in the process of communicating with the project director about the report and next steps.
Standard 4: Management
Management involves controlling Instructional Technology through planning, organizing, coordinating, and supervising (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 49). The domain of management includes four subdomains of theory and practice: Project Management, Resource Management, Delivery System Management, and Information Management. Within each of these subdomains there is a common set of tasks to be accomplished: organization must be assured, personnel hired and supervised, funds planned and accounted for, facilities developed and maintained, and short- and long-term goals established. A manager is a leader who motivates, directs, coaches, supports, monitors performance, delegates, and communicates.
monitoring systems, and evaluate progress. The School Evaluation Summary Report that I created for EdTech 501 exemplifies a part of the project management process the analysis stage of the instructional design process. The analysis rubric (found in Appendix A) covers all aspects of Project Management, including budget, information monitoring systems, and evaluation processes. My Evaluation Project for EdTech 505, Evaluation of the Social Media Integration Program For the UCBHSSPs Summer Institutes, demonstrates a fuller range along this same spectrum, beginning with a Program Description, moving on to Evaluation, Results, Discussion, and Budgets. While I have not been engaged in any large-scale projects since completing these, my concurrent work in EdTech 512 to design AugmentED, a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course), does entail my facility with these skills. I would imagine that in the future this skill set will continue to come in handy as I implement the MOOC and branch out to become engaged in other, similar ventures.
and wanted to try designing with it. I have since integrated this module into my course on educational technology for pre- and inservice English teachers, where I have adapted it to Blackboard. Unfortunately, the original course created in Moodle Sandbox no longer exists, but you can view the nearly identical one I am currently teaching here.
Standard 5: Evaluation
Evaluation is the process of determining the adequacy of instruction and learning (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 54). Educational communications and instructional technology (ECIT) candidates demonstrate their understanding of the domain of evaluation through a variety of activities including problem analysis, criterion-referenced measurement, formative evaluation, and summative evaluation.
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Criterion-referenced measurement involves techniques for determining learner mastery of pre-specified content (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 56). Criterion-referenced assessment determines learners mastery of specified learning goals relative to those goals (not to other learners, which would be norm-referenced measurement). I demonstrate my abilities in designing criterion-referenced measurement in my EdTech 503 project, Making Radio Show Bumpers: A Genre Study and Hands-On Pedagogy Unit, where the rubric I designed measures the learners performance relative to criteria specified on the rubric (which correspond to the units learning objectives). While I was developing this rubric for the EdTech program, I was also creating a criterion-based assessment for the actual courses that I was teaching. As you can see, the rubric for the reflective essay in my undergraduate Writing Methods Course measures learners performance on the writing task against the criteria/objectives that were the focus of the instruction during the unit. In both cases, I use these rubrics as tools for formative and summative assessment of student learning: early on, I will develop a self- or peer- assessment activity in which students assess their own or their peers work using the criteria of the rubric (formative); and at the very end of the unit, I also use the rubric to determine students performance on the final assessment in the unit (summative).
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plans,. During this process, I also learned about some of the debates surrounding this aspect of technology evaluation, including the argument that some, such as J. See (1992), make that long-term planning is inappropriate for educational technology, given the rapid pace at which new technologies are always emerging. Nonetheless, I did engage in some long-range planning around technology use in the EdTech 501 Digital Inequality Assignment, in which a group of students collaborated to help a municipality or state address issues of inequity and access through technology solutions. In this case, it only makes sense that our plan would be a multi-stage and long-term, strategic one. Similarly, my School Evaluation Summary Report for EdTech 501 makes long-term recommendations based on the evaluation of different aspects of technology maturity in administrative, curricular, support, connectivity, and innovation domains. The benchmarks for the different stages of technology maturity ranging from the Emergent Systems, through Islands of Technology, to Integrated Systems, to Intelligent Systems stages indicate a long-range orientation to this type of planning, which I was very grateful to have realized. Having bookended my EdTech experience with this type of evaluation at the very beginning and the EdTech 505 Evaluation Summary toward the very end, really helped me to see the reciprocal ways in which long-range planning and evaluation constitute and mutually reinforce the iterative process of instructional design.
CONCLUSION
When I began the EdTech program over a year ago, I believed that -- as a teacher educator who was entering the M.E.T. program with an already highly developed specialization in technology integration -- I knew a good deal of what there was to know about educational technology and pedagogy. However, I am pleased to say that I was wrong. I may have known quite a bit at the time, but I have been pleasantly surprised in the meantime to discover how much more there has been to learn. As a result of my M.E.T. experience, today I am able to say with great confidence and humility that not only do I better know how to teach with technology, but I also understand the resonances of that statement. If I entered the program with a strong sense of my subject matter and how to teach it or what Shulman (1987) calls Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) I am leavlng it with an even more solid sense of TPCK, or what Koehler & Mishra (2009) call Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Given the well designed, researchbased, collaborative, authentic, hands-on, and reflective qualities of Boise States M.E.T. program, I feel that my knowledge in these areas has become thoroughly integrated over the past year and a half. I could not have asked for (or imagined) a better outcome. As much as I have gone deep with my knowledge and skills, I feel that I have also gone wide. Which is to say that I was perhaps most surprised to discover the significance of the contextualizing issues surrounding instructional technology and design. My design and evaluation experiences in the EdTech
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program have taught me that the first (and perhaps most important) step that a designer makes is a backwards one. Only through the perspective gained from analyzing the problem -- be it tomorrows lesson or of an entire organizations desire to work toward a certain long -term goal designer see how to move forward. Based on that wide view, informed by analysis contextualizing perspective, solutions can be designed, developed, implemented, and evaluated, on, and so on.
I hope that this essay and portfolio give some indication of the scope and depth of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that I have developed through my experience in the M.E.T. program and of the depth of my gratitude for the quality instructors and learning experiences that it has been my pleasure and privilege to enjoy these past five semesters.
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REFERENCES
Clark, R. C. & Mayer, R. E. (2003). E-learning and the science of instruction. San Francisco: Pfeiffer. Davidson-Shivers, G. V. & Rasmussen, K. L. (2006). Web-based learning: Design, implementation and evaluation. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Keller, J. M. (1987). Development and use of the ARCS model of instructional design. Journal of instructional development, 10 (3), 2-10. Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2009). What is technological pedagogical content knowledge? Contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, 9 (1), 60-70. Lohr, L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning and performance: Lessons in visual literacy (2 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill. Molenda, M. 2004. The ADDIE Model. In A. Kovalchick & K. Dawson (Eds.), Educational technology: An encyclopedia (pp. 7-9). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio. See, J. 1992/2001. Developing effective technology plans. The computing teacher, 9 (8). Retrieved from http://www.nctp.com/html/john_see.cfm. Seels, B. B. & Richey, R. C. (1994). Instructional technology: The definition and domains of a field . Washington, D. C.: AECT. Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard educational review, 57, 122. Standards. Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Retrieved November 10, 2013, from http://www.aect.org/standards/initstand.html.
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