Laura Glas
Annotated Transcript
Below you will find a list of courses that I took to receive my Master of Arts in Educational Technology Degree from Michigan State University.
*CEP: Counseling, Education Psychology, and Special Education
CEP 810: Teaching Understanding with Technology
Kim Powell
This course focused on learning what it means for students to understand content knowledge. As well as how to achieve student understanding through the use of technology. I must teach students to learn and how to find information instead of teaching them information. My aim is now to give my students the tools to find historical information instead of only memorizing key facts. The ability to take their knowledge and transform it into a deeper understanding is of much importance.
Fall
2018
CEP 811: Adapting Innovative Technology to Education
Janine Campbell
Throughout this course, I was encouraged to be creative and consider myself as a maker. This course focused on taking various technologies and adapting them to education and all content areas. I was encouraged to learn different technologies myself and apply them to my teaching experience. I learned how to incorporate maker education into my classroom pushing students to think differently about the world around them. I created a lesson that incorporated both science and history standards while providing hands-on learning to students.
CEP 812: Applying Educational Technology to Practice
Nicole Zumpano
How I question our surroundings and thoughts affects our lives, mindsets, and outlook on life was the main focus of this course. Understanding that asking questions can increase our understanding of problems even if I do not yet have a solution to that problem. That solution I do come up with can differ depending on the context of the question we are asking. I discovered this myself as we created and research a wicked problem. Our questions about that problem were just as important as to the solutions I discovered. Answers are not the end all be in our classrooms, it is more important to understand the why, how, and what-ifs than to rattle off an answer. If my students are asking questions they are engaging with the content which is the true goal.
Spring
2019
CEP 817: Learning Technology Through Design
Bret Staudt Willet and Dr. Liz Owens Boltz
This course had me identify a problem of practice that I experience in my teaching practice. Implementing design thinking to create an effective solution to the identified problem. I identified the problem of teaching teachers to use technology effectively. Moving through each step of design thinking: empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test to create a professional development to provide opportunities for teachers to collaborate and design effective lessons using technology. During this class, I learned how to fail and use that failure to create more effective designs. This course challenged me to think more deeply and expand my knowledge.
CEP 800: Learning in Schools and Other Settings
CEP 815: Technology and Leadership
CEP 822: Approaches to Educational Research
Dave Goodrich and Missy Cobsy
Summer
Hybrid
2019
These three-courses taken together helped me learn about learning, leadership, and research. Focusing on relevant learning theories and how they can be evident in my teaching and classroom design without me noticing. These courses had me reviewing my teaching practices to see if what I do aligns with what I think. As a class, we examined what makes good research, who decides it is good research, and how we can determine what is good research. This part of the class helped me to examine not only my own research but data that is presented to me as a teacher. I also learned how visualizing data can help to make connections between data that are not apparent otherwise.
The final and most important takeaway from these classes is about leadership. Focusing on what it takes to be a leader and how we can be leaders in our own classrooms and lives. Leadership is not always being out front, but helping each other from behind the scenes. I learned through real experience how to coach other teachers in creating lesson plans that effectively implemented technology. I learned effective feedback strategies like describe, evaluate, and suggest to use when coaching fellow teachers. These courses provided me with learning cohort that I can share and receive ideas from.
CEP 813: Electronic Assessment
Bret Staudt Willet and William Bork
The main focus of this course was on how and why we assess students. This course helped me to evaluate my own assessments that I have used over the years. This course also helped me to create an assessment design checklist to help create assessments in my own practice. This checklist focused on making sure assessment choices were research-based. Throughout this class, I examined different forms of assessment such as game-based assessment. Learning that we can assess without giving a multiple-choice tests. I created a game based assessment and a formative assessment that used videos, drawings, and writing to assess student understanding.
Fall
2019
CEP 820: Teaching Students Online
Dr. Anne Heintz and Marissa Zhu
This course helped me to examine different LMS/ CMS (Learning management and course management systems). I choose a CMS that I thought would benefit my students the most. I learned how to engage my students through a variety of online resources and how to assess their learning. The cumulative project was the creation of an online course for fourth-graders teaching them about place value and how to multiply numbers by 10s, 100s, and 1,000s. This project taught me how to make online learning inclusive to all of my learners through the use of visuals, closed captioning, a variety of response methods, and more.
CEP 807: Capstone in Educational Technology
Dr. Matthew Koehler and Aric Gaunt
This course focused on curating my learning from the last two years. I put my journey to my Master's degree together in my capstone portfolio. This course helped me to reflect by developing a website to showcase what I have learned and what I hope to learn in the future. The portfolio that I created is a representation of who I am as a teacher and how I became that teacher.
