Learner
ISTE-E Standard Text
Learner - Educators continually improve their practice by learning from and with others and exploring proven and promising practices that leverage technology to improve student learning. Educators:
Set professional learning goals to explore and apply pedagogical approaches made possible by technology and reflect on their effectiveness.
Explore and apply: Learn about, test and add into regular practice a variety of proven, promising and emerging learning strategies with technology.
Pursue professional interests by creating and actively participating in local and global learning networks.
Creating and actively participating in: For example, starting social media chats or groups; blogs that encourage discussion; virtual webinars, meet-ups, edcamps or unconferences; collaborative asynchronous writing or working teams.
Local and global learning networks: Virtual and blended learning communities such as social media groups or chats, virtual PLNs, conferences, meet-ups, edcamps and school-based professional learning communities.
Stay current with research that supports improved student learning outcomes, including findings from the learning sciences.
Stay current with research: stay current through practices like setting search engine email alerts for specific topics, following thought leaders or key organizations on social media or RSS feeds, attending presentations or webinars and subscribing to edtech research journals or other media sources.
Student learning outcomes: The knowledge, skills, and dispositions a learner should have at the end of an assignment or learning unit
Learning sciences: Interdisciplinary field bringing together findings -- from search into cognitive, social and cultural psychology; neuroscience and learning environments, among others -- with the goal of implementing learning innovations and improving instructional practice.
Reflection
Learning is a lifelong journey that didn't begin when we entered our first classroom and that won't end with our retirement from our careers as educators. Living in a society with other beings means that inherently there will always be something new to learn about. Although learning is something that occurs whether we seek it out or not, this ISTE-E Standard approaches the concept as a proactive action taken by an educator. Experiences help us learn, but our responsibility to effect change in a student's life requires us to always try to find new and better ways at getting showing our students. Another responsibility we have as educators is to contribute to our community as a whole and not withhold information and/or techniques we use to teach others. "Imitation is the best form of admiration" holds true, especially in our career path, because our objective is to help society and others progress. With the advent of technology and the world wide web, the ability to easily gather and share information makes our responsibility to develop our craft endless. Whether it be through informal social groups, virtual professional development, or even modules/lessons provided to teach students these same techniques, our contributions to this field of study are what allow it to continue progressing. Formal development through PDs provided by schools and districts, tuition remission to obtain advanced degrees, and grade-level meetings also contribute to this lifelong participation in the educative community. Technology has become a tool that we can use to develop our own learning as well as tools that we can utilize in our lessons and help others learn.
Artifact 1
My first artifact is a Virtual Attendance Tracker that I created and developed from scratch using my knowledge of google sheets, applying concepts from a few undergraduate computer science courses, A LOT of google searches/youtube videos, and collaboration with teachers and administrators(the ones who would be using this document). At the beginning of the pandemic, my district required schools to develop internal systems to keep track of their students that were no longer physically coming to school. Our district used PowerSchool traditionally to take attendance, but it was not updated to reflect the pandemic and the different situations our students were experiencing. Due to unclear attendance policies as well as nobody knowing how long this pandemic would last, i created a google sheet that would be updated daily by teachers to provide everyone with a simple way of communicating where our students were. I had to take into account several factors when creating this sheet such as ease-of-use, which information would be available, and ability to update and change with the addition/removal of students from our rosters. This tracker allowed for teachers to easily keep track of students specific attendance status(virtually present, asynchronous learning, contact with family, or absent) on a daily basis, obtain extensive and up-to-date contact information for all their students, and also provided administrators with a central location to see teachers submission of attendance as well as student attendance trends. My tracker broke attendance rates by grade-level, month, and teacher. It also utilized queries to immediately report students that were chronically absent as well as students with perfect attendance.
Artifact 2
My second artifact is a lesson plan that I created during a summer debate camp session to teach and help students develop the research skills that would make them more efficient debaters. I started the lesson plan on a google sheet using my own knowledge and after running the lesson by other former debaters, was able to add on other techniques such as how to use technology efficiently. Technology can be very useful, but it can also be overwhelming. And thus, knowing techniques such as where to gather search terms from, which search terms to use, how to omit some data, and time management are all essential tools in being literate in using technology to their advantage. After the lesson, I also made the lesson plan available so that they could refer back to some of the techniques learned during the module.