Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments. Teachers:

  • promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness

    I strongly believe that finding and testing new solutions to problems is a necessary part of the teaching experience. I demonstrated this when we experienced problems with our class discussion board. As an experimental solution, I created a discussion completely hosted on YouTube. It's important to also foster this spirit of creative, innovative, and inventive thinking in our students. For this reason, in my classes, I had my students create both a podcast and movie project.

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  • engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources

    When students are working on real world problems instead of academic abstractions, they have a greater motivation to particpate and learn. I knew when I created my Technology Integrated Learning Plan I wanted to created a science lesson where students would be able to move beyond formula's and equations. I found a video game that was also a projectile simulator and came up with a plan to teach concepts like projectile flights and range using the video game.

    Sometimes, all it takes to engage students in issue exploration and problem solving is to get them talking. As a teacher, I wanted to really emphasize class discussions and made it major goal of the class. When class discussions were ineffecient or impossible due to software issues, I found a new medium the students could use, and one that most of them was already familiar with: YouTube.

    Finally, my students are future teachers, and the major goal of the class I teach is to make them better students and teachers using technology. As part of the class, there are two major group assignments aimed at getting them to think about how they will use technology as a teaching tool. These are the iMovie and Podcasting projects. The Web Application Presentation was a solo student project aimed at giving the students teaching experience using technology.

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  • promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes

    Reflection is a necessary part of education, and it is a practice I want to foster in all of my students. As such, I make reflection papers part of many of the major assignments in the class, such as the Web Application Presentation, the Podcasting Project, and the iMovie project. In these reflections, I direct students to consider their experience and examine questions such as: how they feel the assignment went, what could have been better, and how they might use the technology involved in their future classroom.

    A necessary skill for any teacher to have is the ability to understand and model complex ideas and communicate those ideas to others. The process of mind mapping provides a framework for performing this task. As part of my class, I demonstrate many different types of mind mapping tools, some that are free, or online web applications, and also paid web applications. One of the major projects in the class is using Inspiration (software) to create a mind map.

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  • model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments

    Humans are social beings. As such, we are naturally collaborative and cooperative. By working together, we can create things that would be difficult to impossible for an individual to create. I try to foster collaboration and cooperation in my students by fostering discussions, as well as group projects including podcasting and a movie project.

    It is equally important to continue collaboration with colleagues and others. To me, this means creating things like an education web resource wiki which was built with other students in this program. Another way to continue the dialogue is through conference presentations, which I give yearly at the KC Technet Conference. This conference is attended by local educators who share how they are using technology in education.

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Standards text taken from the ISTE Website.