Gottfried:
Gottfried’s audience was high school educators, specifically ELA teachers. In my personal opinion, Gottfried’s site was very text heavy and at times perhaps even overwhelming. It was clear that like myself, Gottfried has evolved her driving question throughout the program. In that regard, I can appreciate the difficulty of communicating a concept that has shifted over time. I would say, considering who her audience is, that Gottfried did a solid job in reaching her audience. Dearborn: Dearborn’s audience was primarily elementary teachers in need of technological support. For many teachers, technology can be intimidating considering how comfortable our young students tend to be. Dearborn implemented a combination of text and images as a means of effectively reaching her audience. Perhaps one of her best decisions was including not only student samples, but surveys of her fellow educators. Ultimately, I would argue that Dearborn did a more than sufficient job in addressing her audience. Saslow: Saslow’s audience was also high school educators, specifically science teachers. Saslow’s goal was to provide teachers with the means to create lessons that are not only engaging, but also cover necessary standards. Saslow’s site was efficient and easy to navigate. The fact that he is a science teacher was clearly communicated by the way he designed his page as it was very practical, without sacrificing valuable content. I believe he did a great job and that his audience would benefit from visiting his site.
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When I began this Master’s program, I was not entirely sure what the focus of my project would be, and even less sure about my audience. As I progressed through the program, my interests and knowledge changed. The more I learned, the more I changed my driving question, and so too my audience.
Early on, I had envisioned creating a product that could be equally advantageous and accessible to teachers and students alike. I loved the idea of a website that was pedagogically beneficial to educators, while be accessible enough that my own students could navigate and enjoy. Unfortunately, as my project has moved from theory to reality, I have come to the conclusion that my audience will be much more narrow than anticipated. My capstone project focuses on the strategic leveraging of technology as a means of facilitating and more so, enhancing, student collaboration in order to develop critical their thinking skills. While I find this topic highly fascinating, I must be honest with myself and question how well students would approach such a topic. I do see the irony that students collaborate digitally everyday, but I am unsure of my ability at this time to communicate my research and ideas in student friendly language. I am actually more comfortable with an all teacher audience. I think in order to be interested in what I will be discussing, one would need not only some background knowledge on the topic, but a potential application as well. My goal for my capstone project is that teachers will be able to visit my sight, consider my findings, and apply them with their own students. In that sense, it is as if their students are still benefiting from my project, without needing to visit my site for themselves. I honestly expect that the majority of my audience will consist of educators who are pursuing Master’s degrees of their own. Which brings me to my Learn More pages. I think in order to provide my audience with sufficient background information, I will include information ranging from relevant definitions to resources that they can visit for themselves. Am I Trans-illiterate??
After conducting some light research and engaging in a lively conversation with my cohort members, I finally feel like I have a decent understanding of Transliteracy. The general consensus seems to be that Transliteracy is the ability to understand information that may be communicated across a range of modes or platforms. For example, some people may have very strong speaking or listening skills, but may struggle with reading. Or a more common example that many teachers may be familiar with, is how many students are more proficient at typing then they are at writing by hand. While they both require the author to speak and understand the English language, the way they are interacting with the content has varied. This is, I believe, the core of Transliteracy. Being transliterate requires that a person be proficient across multiple modes of communication. This includes, but is not limited to communicating through words (spoken, written, even signed) as well as through technology such as tv, radio, film and of course, the internet. So what is the role Transliteracy in education? If my understanding of transliteracy is correct, then it has a pivotal role to play in the modern classroom. According to work done by Marshall Mcluhan, media has greatly impacted the way we think and interact. The invention of the telephone made it possible for people to communicate almost instantly across long distances. However, the invention of the phone did more than just allow long distance communication, it actually changed the way we greet other humans, changed the way we ended conversations, gave way to new euphemisms and expressions. These are what Mcluhan refers to as “Unforeseen consequences”. These Unforeseen consequences have certainly made their way into the the classroom. Many teachers are undoubtedly familiar with students’ growing obsession with technology. Physically speaking, they are curious and engaged by the tangible devices such as smart phones, tablets and even smart watches. Virtually speaking, students are even more interested with the “places” these devices “take them”. Their technology allows them to communicate with an even larger audience from even greater distances, across different platforms. We may have had pen pals back in elementary, but now your average student essentially owns their own virtual bill board where they can broadcast any message they want. This also means, on the reciprocal end, that the very same children can witness the “billboards” of every other online user. As you can imagine, this too has “Unforeseen Consequences” . Like what?? The shift towards transliteracy has lead to children becoming more comfortable with multimedia from a young age. Most children can no longer be sufficiently satisfied by one or two modes of communication. Imagine a modern child sitting by a radio, and merely listening to a teleplay. I doubt many of my students would settle for such a thing. Today’s youth demand more. They want to SEE and to HEAR and to READ and to TOUCH and INTERACT with their content. And why shouldn't they? Why should we deprive our students of these modalities? The only challenge is properly preparing students to navigate a transliterate world. When I was first asked to create a driving question for this program, I was encouraged to focus on something I was genuinely passionate about. At the time, I was most passionate about developing my students' ability to think critically. Therefore my initial driving question was:
"How might we utilize technology to develop students critical thinking skills?" Not very flashy I know, but genuine nonetheless. My initial research lead me on a journey of discovery. I was especially interested in the concept of visual literacy and visual critical thinking. I learned a great deal about this topic, but perhaps my greatest lesson was how much work and research had already been successfully accomplished around this topic. Therefore, I decided to rethink my driving question. While progressing through the program, my skills and knowledge have grown, but my passion still seemed to remain the same: Developing my students' abilities to think critically. Fortunately, I acquired some new insights behind my passion. I started to ask myself a powerful question: WHY?
After considering these questions, I began to reshape my driving question, resulting in: "How might we leverage collaboration via technology to develop students' critical thinking skills for the 21st century? At the start of this Masters program I was so excited about developing my digital skills that I forgot technology is a means to an ends, and not the end itself. That is to say, technology should not be the star of the show. It is merely a tool, perhaps an incredible one, but still just a tool. I realized what I wanted to investigate was how this tool might be used differently in a collaborative group setting, as opposed to independently. And ultimately, how using tech collaboratively would impact students' critical thinking skills. Ironically, the inspiration for this change actually came directly from interfacing digitally with my cohort peers. I find it interesting how every week I meet and learn with different people of different skills, backgrounds, and insights, all to work on a common goal. Specifically, we are meeting and collaborating digitally. We use wonderful tools such as Zoom, Padlet, AdobeSpark and the list goes on and on. What I find curious, is how our ability and collaborate is enhanced by the tools we use. This is my goal for my capstone. I want to understand the roll technology can play in facilitating collaboration, as a means of enhancing critical thinking. Then I can share this with other educators. Other teachers could ultimately encourage other students to digitally collaborate and so on. |
AuthorThe best teachers never cease to be students. Archives
December 2017
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