Steve Lawatsch​

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​When I applied to the MAET program at Michigan State I knew that I would be fulfilling many different goals.  First, I needed to fulfill the professional development requirements necessary to secure my professional teaching certificate in Michigan.  I chose the MAET program because I felt that it would be a way to stand out from my colleagues and position me to become a leader in my district and beyond.  It is also not a coincidence that my choice to pursue a Master’s in Educational Technology is directly related to my love of technology.  Since I was little I have always loved computers and electronics and it seemed natural to look for ways to incorporate this into my profession. In pursuing this degree I have met all of these goals but have also exceeded my expectations in many ways.

In my opinion the MAET program is unique in the sense that it feels very open to allowing an individual to define their own goals.  Admittedly my basis for comparison is considerably limited; however, given the many discussions I have had with my peers in the program it seems that they are meeting their own very different goals via the same program. Personally, throughout each class I felt as though I was able to focus on my own goals.  Perhaps this is because they paired well with the program’s goals, but I feel as though other students would have been equally able to meet their own different goals. 
 

Putting it all Together: What the MAET Program Has Meant to Me

​At the outset my main goal was to learn how to utilize technologies that I had access to in my classroom in an intelligent and useful way.  Before I began the program I had been utilizing many new technologies and was often given the job of beta testing new technologies for my department.  While I could often describe what aspects of a technology proved to be problematic or useful.  In hindsight, what I was usually doing with them was randomly putting things in my students’ hands and hoping that they would prove useful.  I had a sense that there was probably a better way to go about using technology but I was confident that I knew about a lot of technology.  My first courses in the MAET program quickly proved that I was correct in believing that there was a better way to employee technology in a classroom and also that I knew a of a lot less technology than I had imagined.

CEP 810 was the first course I took in the sequence and I was introduced almost a once to a whole new set of technology that I had never experienced.  The introduction of CEP810 was centered on Web 2.0 technologies.  At the time I had done little more with than heard the phrase used casually in the media but had never really spent time considering its meaning.  WeThrough the first set of assignments I was forced to use technologies that I had never before experienced.  I will admit that I was somewhat reluctant at first to want to know about these new technologies.  I felt as though I was already overwhelmed by all of the technology that I was already engaged in trying to understand and that additional distractions would only serve to distract me from my goal of figuring these out.  At the same time I also felt an element of intrigue.  I distinctly recall working on one of the major projects of this course and simultaneously editing a document in Google Docs with my peers while carrying on a chat conversation along side and thinking this is really cool.  I also remember getting my wife to set up a Google Docs account just so I could show her the simultaneous editing.

What followed from this initial class was a whirlwind of introductions to new technologies, most of them web based.  Some were very interesting like Google Docs while others were tedious and difficult to learn and did not always meet my preferences for how I wanted to interact with the content of the classes.  Other times I found myself becoming so engrossed in learning the technology that I forgot that I was also supposed to be meeting the other criteria laid out in the assignment I was working on.  In either case, I found that I had expanded my repertoire of technologies significantly.

At the same time I was learning a multitude of new technologies I was also constantly being asked to reevaluate my ideas about what it means to teach well.  Throughout the courses we explored ideas about what it means to learn, how people learn, how do we assess learning, etc.  While I did not view any of the ideas that we were asked to explore as groundbreaking I feel as though one of the more important aspects of the program was to force me reexamine my beliefs and seek to justify and explain why I make the choices that I do in my practice.

One idea that we were introduced to which did have a significant impact on my practice was the idea of TPACK.  TPACK is represented by three circles, representing technology (T), pedagogy (P), and content knowledge (CK).  The circles each intersect each other and it is in these intersections that we find the areas where two of the components work in concert to allow for the maximum benefit to the student.  All three circles intersect as well and it is within this area that we find all three ideas working to complement each other.  In my first several years of teaching I honed my skills in terms of blending pedagogy and content knowledge, albeit in the absence of having an understanding the framework that  I was actually working with.  The TPACK framework helped me to understand more about what I had already been doing and gave me the ability to recognize that I was now simply adding an additional layer of complexity to what I already knew.. 

Despite my initial reticence to engage in learning so many new technologies this is the point where the degree shifted in front of my eyes.  About three quarters of the way through the program I found that I was no longer looking for opportunities to fit a particular technology into a lesson, rather I was flipping through an arsenal of technologies to select one that was most appropriate to my needs.  This change was subtle at first but as I have spent more and more time doing it, it began to become a conscious thought process.  The act of being cognizant about the choices of a technology and the reasons for its selection are one of the main goals I had for myself when I applied to the program.

What has become even more interesting is that I have also learned to evaluate the deficits of a technology and look for ways to work around them.  This has taken the form of using multiple technologies, where secondary and tertiary technologies fill the gaps left by the preceding level in the hierarchy.   A perfect example of this type of thinking is found in the website that I developed as part of my teaching assignment for the 2010-2011 school year.  The site itself was made with Weebly but we wanted to do more than just post a series of glorified lectures for students.  We wanted the students who visited the website to have a chance to interact with the mathematics.  In response to this we choose to embed Google Docs Presentations, set up interactive modules where the students could engage in doing problems and selecting answers for which they would receive immediate feedback and remediation.  The combination of Weebly to house a collection of content and allow for its easy delivery to students and Google Presentations to actually deliver individual content ideas was fine but we felt as though we also wanted to collect some evidence to assess the effectiveness of the modules we had created.  Neither of the tools we had selected easily afforded us the ability to do this.  We choose to go back to the Google Docs suite this time selecting a Google Form to embed into each module.  The form allowed students to demonstrate their understanding of the topic they had recently covered and provided us with some degree of feedback.  The MAET program provided me the tools to engage in this type of task, both in terms of providing me access to a multitude of technology from which to draw on but also because it provided me with a framework to engage in thinking about what my specific needs were and how to select technologies that fit them.

Of all of the classes that I took in the MAET program I feel that CEP 820 was the one that really represents all that I have learned in the program.  CEP 820 is titled teaching K-12 students online.  Perhaps it is because I took this class towards the end of the program but to me it truly represents the synthesis of all that I have learned.  The main product of CEP 820 is an online course.  The course was partitioned into approximately six chunks, each dealing with a particular aspect of designing an online learning environment.  As I progressed through each of these modules I found that I was either asked to think about an idea or topic that was covered in a previous course.  What was so powerful about this was that every time I was asked to look back and think about an idea I was also being forced to use this information to make a decision about how to build my course.  We were also asked to keep track of our thinking by keeping a developers notebook, which forced us to make our thinking visible and justify the decisions we were making.  As I was constructing a module for my website I found that I was once again being extremely cognizant about how the technology, pedagogy and content interacted and was engaged in making choices about how to keep them working together.  CEP 820 allowed me to make practical use of the knowledge I had accumulated to that point.

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When I started thinking through some of the major projects that I had completed that I have come a really long way. The two projects that I discuss represent hundreds of decisions that had to be made, some big some little, but I feel as though the fact that I was aware of them is a direct result of being a part of this program.  Of course, this type of thinking is not limited to just these examples, it is truly now a part of who I am as a teacher.