Bernie the St. Benard's Techy World

Reflection This course was beneficial to me as an educator in that I learned not only a few new technologies to incorporate into my teaching but also how to create a PBL, a UbD and develop a grant. In the past, I had considered all of these to be too time-consuming. The PBL is somewhat time-consuming, but if you have an idea and sources, the process goes rather quickly. The UbD took considerable time. There were many components to consider, but in the end, I had a unit that will last at least a month and provide students with a unique learning experience. I was most surprised about the ease of writing the grant. I know some grants require letters of references and lots of other data, but the NEF grant that I chose was pretty straightforward. It was a form and you basically just fill it out and get a few signatures. I also looked at several other grants and many of these were simply comprised of completing a form with three or four boxes - seems easy enough. Moving forward, I plan

Artifact 2 Student Device Agreement Form The second artifact I choose was the student device agreement form that I created. With technology becoming more and more present in all schools, it is important that the first thing students learn is digital citizenship and what it means to be responsible and accountable when using technology. Often in my classes, we discuss the importance of being cautious of an individual's digital footprint, but we tend to overlook the responsibility that comes with borrowing a device. My school is 1:1 Chromebook and most students do a great job of keeping their devices maintained; however, there are approximately 2-3 students in each class with Chromebooks that are on the verge of being unusable - shattered screens, missing keys, frame coming off of monitor, keyboard not attached properly and so on. When I speak to these students about the condition of their device, they do not seem to mind or even care. In my opinion, if a student cannot m

ARTIFACT 1 UbD Link The first artifact I chose was the Understanding by Design Unit. Prior to this class, I had heard of UbD units; however, I had never created one. It seemed like quite a bit of work and research would be involved in creating one of these units. After creating a UbD unit, my thinking was correct - at least for me. Creating the unit was time-consuming and took many hours to plan and incorporate common core standards with the use of meaningful technology. So it definitely took some determination to complete. The article, Understanding by Design Framework by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins was helpful in understanding the concepts of UbD units. According to McTighe and Wiggins, "Teachers are coaches of understanding, not mere purveyors of content knowledge, skill, or activity" (ASCD Online). This really helped me in designing my unit by knowing that I would take a less prominent role in student work, but at the same time, it was a bit difficult t