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.
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Promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness
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Engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources
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Promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes
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Model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments
Standard i
Reflections & Artifacts
The first standard mainly focuses on teachers' ability to enhance students' creativity and consciousness of collaboration. As a current instructor, one should possess the ability to work with technology as well as to integrate it into daily face-to-face or virtual teaching practices. Students, who live in the 21st century, are supposed to use technology applications expertly to facilitate their learning and develop innovative thinking skills. Besides, being good at collaborating with peers is another necessary skill for students. With the advent of numerous free online communication tools, sharing information among several parties requires little time and energy.
Three artifacts were chosen to demonstrate my skills aligned with this standard. The first artifact is the Flash project which was created with Adobe Animate CC and represents my ability to explore real-world issues as well as solve authentic problems. As an efficient helper, the project provides USM Chinese newcomers with a series of instructions ranging from living choices to transportation suggestions. Being presented with Flash, the project combines several multimedia elements, such as text, image, video, audio and animation. The project also addresses teachers' ability to use technology in promoting innovative and creative thoughts. Flash enables people to design activities creatively embedded with multimedia elements. For the second artifact, I choose the class blogfolio for IT648 as the representative. The Blog can be regarded as a great tool for students to reflect on course content and other learning experiences. At the same time, the function of commenting and replying can easily elicit group collaboration. From the artifact, you'll notice that except for my course reflections, there are also several comments from my peers, which shows the collaborative learning feature of the blog. The last artifact is a group report written in Google Doc together with my online classmates, Adrienne, Chantanna, Danianese and Justin. The focus of the report is to test some communication tools offered by Blackboard. Using Google Doc to collaboratively work on the same document provides learners with the opportunity of immediately understand each other's idea towards the same topic and efficiently forming the consensus among the group members.
To view the artifacts in detail, please click the following thumbnails.
Future learning goals
Due to the fast development of technology, we can easily imagine that there will be much more user-friendly and efficient technology products shortly. As a qualified teacher in our field, I would attend international and local conferences to renew myself of the technology skills and the teaching methodologies. In that way, I can promise myself that I would not be left behind, and thus my students would always be in trend. Learners must be able to develop their creative and innovative thinking skills with the technology. Also, since technology keeps improving, more functions would be embedded in online collaboration programs. Considering these facts, I'd like to design more activities for my students to conduct group learning practices.
