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.
3 Comments
Nancy
9/5/2017 07:54:02 pm
Hi Jimmy,
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dan
9/5/2017 08:17:14 pm
Jimmy,
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Patrick
10/20/2017 02:19:58 pm
Jimmy
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