School Evaluation Summary

This assignment was interesting and difficult. Interesting because it exposed me to a side of the college which I really had no familiarity with, its technology. What surprised me the most was that the college has a comprehensive Technology Master Plan, which outlines the technology goals for the institution for the long term. It also releases yearly reports on the objectives that have been met, are in progress, or require funding.  Another aspect of the college that I had no idea about was the Technology Planning Committee. I am embarrassed to admit it but I have worked at this institution for over three years now and I had no I idea that this committee even existed. I never went out of my way to ask about the existence of such a committee, but it was never mentioned in any faculty meetings, or if it was mentioned it was just in passing.  

As far as teacher use of technology is concerned, it was not surprising that not as many faculty members use technology in their courses as there could be. As I mention in my summary, many faculty members have access to technology for the classroom and even readily accept new technologies but implementation is another story. Technology in many departments means a Scantron machine for assessment and an overhead projector for lectures. However, the instructors who do use technology use it creatively and effectively in their classrooms and as supplementary material for students to access online.

This assignment was a bit difficult mainly because of the Maturity Model Benchmarks. First, many of the benchmark labels and definitions seemed to overlap.  Another issue I encountered was how to deal with the fact that the college offers both online and on-site courses. Of course online instructors and students utilize technology daily as a necessity but on-site instructors use technology in limited ways and with varying consistency. Scoring some of the categories, especially those dealing with the curricular filter, took a bit of balancing and weighing. One last difficulty was that in the are of Innovation under both new technologies and comprehensive technologies, behavioral and resource/infrastructure descriptors seemed to be reversed, very similar, or at the very least overlapping.  

Here are the links to my evaluation survey and summary:

Maturity Benchmarks Survey

Evaluation Summary

Technology Use Planning Overview

A Working Definition of Technology Use Planning

Technology use planning in education includes the acquisition and effective implementation of technology with the goals of increasing student engagement, meeting student learning outcomes, applying accurate assessment, improving current pedagogy, and developing cutting-edge pedagogy while ensuring that all aspects of student diversity is taken into account.

The National Educational Technology Plan 2010

The National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) 2010 has two goals as its guiding principles: (1) to increase the proportion of college graduates in the United States from 41 percent to 60 percent within the next decade (only 7 years now) and (2) to prepare all high school students for an smooth transition into college. In addition, it outlines where education in the U.S. needs to progress towards in order to remain competitive in the global community. The plan includes five major areas of concern under its Goals and Recommendations: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. Each area explains the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the issues that the NETP, if implemented effectively, will address.

Although the ten-year timeline for meeting these goals seems a bit over-optimistic, the plan itself can be used as an overarching, basic reference for all technology use planning and decisions for all institutions and all who are involved in education including educators, technology specialists, school boards, deans, presidents, and legislators.  Institutional technology plans in particular should be designed around or informed by the NETP and the NETP itself can act as a gauge to measure the progress in meeting the outlined goals.    

The plan for the future of the educational system in the U.S. is the primary focus of the report; however, it is also important to note the research and development section, which describes a new approach to procuring the resources educators need to implement the NETP successfully where research and development is focused solely on education from the outset. This is particularly important because it does not only involve education but also the fields of business and entertainment in collaboration with educational technologists.

Response to Developing Effective Technology Plans

John See claims that long term technology plans might be ineffective because innovations in technology are changing so quickly that plans based on current technology will be outdated before they are even put into action. However, while it may be true that innovations in technology have a higher turnover rate than high school students employed at fast food restaurants, it does not necessarily follow that it is impossible or ineffective to plan for the long term (1-5 years ahead, let us say).   

Institutions can implement a long term technology plan as long as, as See himself implies in his discussion, the plan itself is flexible. A long term plan should be modified during the course of its implementation. These modifications should be based on educational technological innovations that have shown tried and true results which align with the goals set by the institution, which are backed by research, and which have been informed by the National Educational Technology Plan.   

See also argues that in order for a technology plan to be effective, the focus should be on what specific technology and how that specific technology will help in achieving institutional goals rather than on procuring technology and then reflecting on its value to the institution.

I agree with See's point. The idea of being a cutting-edge institution often seems to trump the concern for actual applicability of the technology in achieving goals. I have had conversations with colleagues in which there is agreement that, for example, our students need iPads, but how they fit into even the small scale goals of our department remain unclear. If having iPads would clearly contribute to achieving the college's goal of having all students become global citizens or contributed to developing critical thinking and communication skills, then iPads might be warranted. However, if discovering and developing innovative uses of technology in education is an institutional goal, perhaps the goal itself requires that the technology come before application.

Experience in Technology Use Planning

Presently, I have no experience in technology use planning. In fact, my only real experience with technology in education is creating an occasional power point presentation for a mini-lesson and showing an occasional YouTube or Vimeo video as a supplement to traditional classroom activities. However, I do plan to use some of the technology skills I acquired in the course of EDTECH 501, specifically Feedly, Camtasia, GoAnimate, and Voicethread. There is a lot of potential for using these programs/applications as supplementary material for both my students and colleagues.  

  

Digital Inequality

I have to admit that this week's assignment was quite difficult.  After reading the ITU's reports, viewing the Youtube videos, and reading several of the recommended readings, I had a clear understanding of what digital divide and digital inequality were, but it was not apparent how it affected the students at Santa Monica College.  It is true that many of our classrooms are in the stone age of technology but much of the student population for the most part is from middle-class to outright wealthy families, so access to technology is not an issue.  You would be hard pressed to find a student at SMC who doesn't have a laptop and a smartphone at their fingertips.  In addition, the entire campus is wi-fi enabled.

The energy-efficient light bulb in my head started to flicker to life, however, when I thought about my night students.  As I mention in my presentation, night students are different from traditional day students.  Day students, specifically in the ESL department, are between the ages of 18 and 25, are from some of the most wired countries on the planet (South Korea, Japan, China/Hong Kong), and literally have 24 hour access to the internet.  On the other hand, night students are usually older, work full time jobs during the day, have access to the internet but are usually limited in their ability to effectively use the technology available to them, and are from technologically developing countries.  Many of my night students, for example, are from Mexico and Iran with a few from various African nations.  Many of these factors contribute to the limited technological skills of these night students.  Therefore, I decided to focus my presentation on digital inequality rather than digital divide, more specifically, digital inequality rooted in a lack of skills among night students.

In my presentation, I propose four fairly simple solutions to increase technological competence in this specific population of students: implementing a technology tutoring program, using all available computer equipped classrooms (a no-brainer), devoting a portion of classes to technology, and requiring mandatory faculty professional development in the area of classroom technology.

Here is my VoiceThread presentation: Digital Divide VoiceThread Presentation

    

EDTECH Challenges

The NMC Horizon Report 2013 Higher Education Edition outlines six challenges that higher ed is facing with regards to technology implementation and institutionalization.  The challenge that I addressed was that of educators not utilizing new technology in their instruction or their research.  I chose this issue for several reasons.  First, I had been fighting the need for implementing novel educational technology in my classroom, before I enrolled in this M.E.T. program.  Second, I see that only about 2-3 out of the forty or so faculty members whom I directly work with have actually integrated technology into their classrooms.  My final reason for choosing this challenge stems from a series of e-mails regarding a technology workshop that was presented at the college I teach at as part of a series of faculty development workshops and student success initiatives.  A colleague of mine developed and was to present the workshop, which was about the use of Google Voice and Cel.ly as a possible alternative to using e-mail to keep in contact with students.  Weeks before the workshop was presented, an invitation and RSVP e-mail was sent out to all faculty.  The responses to the invitation were a little disconcerting.  Faculty members from all across campus reprimanded my colleague for attacking and belittling the use of traditional e-mail, while others proposed hypothetical scenarios just short of smartphones destroying all of academia.  This response made it clear to me that there was at least some resistance to technology on campus.

As the Horizon Report explains, this issue is pervasive in higher education.  At my campus, there are technology workshops presented monthly and which faculty may voluntarily attend for professional development and those all-important flex hours.  The two workshops (Camtasia and Google Voice) that I attended this past semester had in attendance an audience of about a half a dozen instructors.  Granted there are constant schedule conflicts and other more immediate issues like lesson planning and grading that may take precedence over a professional development workshop; however, this might be an indicator of how far down a teacher's to do list learning about technology is.  In my department, only a few instructors use new technology in their teaching.  I shamefully admit that I was not one of those few.  

To remedy the current state of technology use on my campus, several solutions might be implemented.  Offering more than one technology workshop every month and at varied hours during the week may give busy educators more flexibility in choosing a date to attend a workshop.  Devoting a portion of all departmental and campus-wide flex days meetings to the introduction and implementation of technology in the classroom  would ensure that all faculty have at least some exposure to educational technology.  This could be made mandatory if necessary.  A requirement that a certain fraction of faculty flex hours be derived from educational technology workshops could be implemented.  At the departmental level, faculty need to see the immediate benefits of implementing technology.  With that in mind, field/content specific materials could be created for demonstration at departmental meetings.   

In my video, I focus on the more immediate challenge of "selling" educational technology to the department chair.  As only a small fraction of instructors in my department use  technology I thought that it would be most beneficial to go to the chair to suggest departmental level technology workshops and possibly to get immediate feedback about implementing technology.  I also very briefly cover the idea of individualized learning (Challenge #4).

Below is my video.  I apologize for the corny dialogue.  Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.  I used Go!Animate to create this video:

EDTECH Research

This assignment brought back memories of grad school.  Sifting through article after article, day after day, was my life.  I wish I had known about Google Scholar and linking it to the university library.  I also wish that I had known about Google Docs and the citing feature.  Though it did not give me a spot on, error free APA citation each time, it would still have made my life much easier, especially when I was compiling a reference list of the 40+ sources that I used for an independent study.  I think that I had convinced myself that I enjoyed the intricacies of writing APA style citations up until the second that I first clicked on the "cite" button in Google Docs.  

Reading the primary literature at the intersection of the fields of Educational Technology, Teaching English as a Second Language, and Applied Linguistics was eye opening.  I had, for so long, ignored and was completely disinterested in the field of computer assisted language learning.  After taking in the lit reviews, data, and results, I realized that many tools, or should I say many effective tools are available for teachers in the field of ESL.  I was amazed at two specific findings: (1) that the use of blogs and wikis does actually have quantitative and qualitative data to support use in the classroom and (2) that researchers have already developed field-specific, web-based tools to support ESL writing classrooms.  Although these findings did show me the promise of using these technologies in the classroom, I thought about one foreseeable problem: Most of these studies were conducted in classes composed  of linguistically and culturally homogeneous students.  My classes are usually linguistically and culturally diverse.  I have not yet found any research addressing this issue.

Overall, I found this exercise useful.  It reawakened my interest in research in general and started my interest in educational technology as it applies to ESL.  

Here is my paper: Annotated Bibliography

RSS in Education

Learning about ways that educators are using RSS was an eye-opening experience.  Prior to this module, I didn't even know what RSS stood for.  I'd seen the little, orange RSS icon millions of times before and never even thought twice about it.  I had no idea that something that could make my life so much easier was literally a tiny orange icon that I had overlooked a million times while I was reading articles on the NYT and NPR.  Needless to say, I installed Feedly and am now addicted to it.    

RSS in Education was a tough assignment!  I initially thought about ways to use RSS with the students I teach: international students who are completing their freshman and sophomore years of college.  After playing with several ideas that I thought would not be very effective for use in the classroom, I switched gears and thought about my colleagues, who like me teach academic reading and writing using a content-based language teaching methodology.  Consequently, I decided that my target audience would be my colleagues rather than our students.  As I mention in my video, one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching content-based ESL is searching for reading materials to supplement the themed units in our textbooks.   My video tutorial explains a way to simplify this search by using RSS to collect content from newsfeeds and blogs and to organize the content to coincide with each of the themed units in "Q:Skills 5 Reading and Writing" (a content-based textbook that many ESL writing teachers use).

I have to say that learning about RSS and ways to use it in education was not nearly as difficult as creating the video tutorial using Camtasia Studio 8 as this was my first real experience with video editing software.  I chose Camtasia since I have had, literally, about 30 minutes of prior experience using it at a faculty development workshop, and I thought that that tiny bit of familiarity with the program would help me somehow.  I was wrong.  The only aspect of Camtasia I was familiar with was the name "Camtasia."  

I apologize in advance for any editing "issues" my video has.  

Here it is: RSS in Education

Elements of Educational Technology

Before reading "The Definition of Educational Technology," my understanding of educational technology or any technology was very limited (not that it isn't limited anymore, though I feel a bit more enlightened).  My encounters with technology in general prior to the reading or the first week of this course for that matter were limited to a facebook account which I closed over two years ago and figuring out that my smartphone has a flashlight function.  Honestly, this is not exaggeration.  As far as educational technology goes I'm embarrassed to admit that my experience is limited to the occasional powerpoint presentation and attempting to set up a wiki for my writing class, which incidentally didn't exactly pan out, and hearing my students talking about "googling" the answers.  Some second-hand experience include listening to some colleagues talk about having their students use threaded discussions and hearing about a program called Camtasia.  I attribute this ignorance partially to my resistance to technology and the fact that the college at which I teach still utilizes chalk, blackboards, and overhead projectors.  Again, not an exaggeration. 

After reading AECT's definition of Ed Tech, which superficially looks fairly self-explanatory, and then reading the in-depth descriptions of each of the definition's core elements, I discovered that Ed Tech is not just power point presentations, facebook blogs, and "googling" it (the understatement of the week).  It is a field not only merging education and technology but also one that is informed by philosophy, ethics, sociology (e.g. critical theory or postmodern stances on ethical practice), and psychology, to name a few.

The assignment of choosing what I thought was the most important element in the definition of Ed Tech really functioned to show me more about my own teaching philosophy and the kind of teacher I strive to be than anything else.  I chose the term facilitating as it seems to be the most basic, foundational characteristic of what being a teacher is and how the tools that educational technology provides should function.

Link to "Elements" Google Doc

Welcome!

Hi, everybody.  My name is Alex Ibaraki.  I'm a teacher in the ESL department at Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, CA.  I teach academic reading and writing, advanced grammar, and academic vocabulary.

I earned a BS in Biology and an MA in English with options in Teaching English as a Second Language and Rhetoric/Composition both from Cal Poly Pomona. I'm pursuing this Master's degree because I want to find new ways to engage my students in on-ground classes, teach online courses, and overcome my paralyzing fear of technology.
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Outside of teaching I enjoy hanging out with my family, trying new food (and drinks), being health conscious, running, reading, and playing the piano.

I plan on using this learning log to organize, share, and reflect on the artifacts that I develop throughout this program.