Digital and Media Literacy been an invaluable course for me. Talented people whom I deeply respect urged me to skip formal tech classes, believing that issues in the ed tech world are changing constantly and anything can be learned online. But I have benefited immensely from the curation of timely materials, the feedback and professional guidance, and the discourse from my fellow students in the education field. It has felt quite luxurious to learn something one moment and apply it in a practical way the next, over and over.
I’m walking away feeling very motivated to argue for equal emphasis and attention to the newer digital literacies. I have a better understanding for the need to balance traditional ways of reading and writing in the primary grades with the new ways of doing these things digitally. I find myself more frequently paging through the assortment of tech standards out there and using them to build my lessons and Professional Development. I see the value to beginning a PD session with a discussion of an Essential Question and I will endeavor to provide multiple, reoccurring PD sessions which give teachers a chance to not only try out a new tech skill immediately but also a supported period of implementing it in the classroom and then coming back to share learning and student examples with colleagues.
I tried the Chatterbox app on a classmate’s recommendation and found that to be even more expressive than Chatterpix. My next tool to try must be Realtime Board! We would like to do more around student collaboration at my school, and this tool should work well with that aim. I was at the ICE Conference the other week, attending a Smartboard Amp presentation, and realized that Realtime Board could do many of the same things for free! I would also like to do an infographic project with the 3rd or 4th grade, it could really cover a host of digital literacy skills. Finally, I feel that Sploder would be a good extension activity for my coding club, I would just like to become a little more proficient at it myself, first!
There are at least two things I would like to learn in the future. One is how to participate in the Maker Movement, including how to use a 3D printer. I should start by purchasing a MaKey MaKey kit since it was featured on the cover of the most recent government tech report no less! I also want to learn how to offer online PD sessions, which might be a good fit for some follow up tech PD sessions in my district. I think our class model is a good start—the succinct, friendly video, some resources posted below, and perhaps an interactive piece like EdPuzzle and/or a threaded discussion. Experimenting with this model with a tech specialist colleague could be a good next step!
