EDTECH 541 Course Reflection
In my work as an instructional designer and an outcome mentor for my college’s information and technology literacy student learning outcome, I regularly use and help instructor integrate technology into their curriculum. Despite that this course took me out of my usual duties and had me looking into two areas where technology is really new for me. These area are assistive technology and technology for English language learners. At my college there is another instructional designer and a whole Special Services department that handles request and looks at ADA compliance. I regularly hear from my colleagues about different technology and UDL but this was the first time I really delve into the readings, the different blog sites and looked at the technologies. Playing with the different technologies I really saw how the different products like speech to text could help all the students in the class and not just the students who needed services. When I looked at the tools for cognitive disabilities I see how they could be adopted in many of our introductory course where college is new for students. I think this course has me grow professionally in that I will start looking for new information and readings in assistive technology and see how I could use technologies for all students. So I see this as the greatest impact of the course. Of course, I love how I developed most of a Principles of Marketing course that has technology fully integrated and also justified through the relevant advantage framework from Roblyer (2016). I also constantly kept looking back fo the National Educational Technology Plan and how make sure students were creators with technology rather than passive consumers of technology. When I look at what theory guided me through this course it was Connectivism (2005). I was always looking at where the knowledge was residing, the currency of the knowledge and how to connect students with a larger network.
References
2016 National Educational Technology Plan (2016). Office of Educational Technology.
Roblyer, M.D. (2016). Integrating Educational Technology Into Technology (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International
Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning, 2 (1). Retrieved from
http://itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm
tech reflections 