New Thoughts on Learning Contracts

After participating in a new faculty meet-n-greet two days ago, I reflected more on the notion of learning contracts. I think this is a prime method for encouraging self-directed and self-regulated learning in our students. Especially as teachers, students will need to engage in active reflection and life-long learning to improve their professional practice. I think that with learning contracts, we could better facilitate this process and it would be a scaffolding tool for now that would hopefully carry on into their future careers as a teacher. I still believe there needs to be an electronic tool that diagnoses and facilitates this entire idea. I have a paper prepared from my dissertation on this. I also plan to blog about my dissertation and results another day. Perhaps later on this week. For resources, I've been looking at WPI's Teaching with Technology Collaborator's site on Learning Contracts and About.com has some interesting information and links for Learning Contracts as well.

New Thoughts on Learning Contracts

Preservice Technology Integration

So, I've been thinking a lot more about my technology integration course. What exactly are the objectives? What do I want my preservice teachers to be able to accomplish by time they leave the course. At IU, we have an interesting set-up of technology integration courses for teachers.

First, our students start out with the typical technology skills course (1 credit hour - w201), then move onto the technology integration course (1 credit hour - w301) which is coupled with their methods field experience course and then finally move onto the technology integration capstone course (1 credit hour - w401) which is coupled with their final field experience before they go into student teaching. This is a great approach because it builds up technology skills, then focuses on integration where they have a venue to try out ideas and talk about integration on a level that is more educationally and pedagogically aware.

We also have an Advanced Technology Integration Focus for our preservice teachers where they take w210 (Survey of Computer-Based Education - 3 credit hours) and w310 (Computer-Based Teaching Methods - 3 credit hours) and end with an online course w435 (Technology LEadership in K-12 - 3 credit hours). I taught w210 this past semester (http://www.indiana.edu/~cel/w210) and had some good and bad reactions.

One student commented in his blog that

"I was expecting more of a lesson of how to incoporate technology into the
classroom. But I feel odd about that subject because I feel as if the class
did not expose me to that subject; but you certainly showed up podcasts and
blogs and other stuff. So I feel like you did your job perfectly. But the
problem is, I think I already knew how to incorporate that type of stuff
into a class. Perhaps it was because of other classes in the School of Ed I
have taken. I also understand that this is the 1st course in a series and I
am looking forward to using these methods in the future." (http://pseib.blogspot.com/)

I guess I'm still confused on exactly what their notion is of integrating technology into a classroom. I had originally set-up this class to have them define their own notion of meaningful technology integration. I did not want to impose my judgements on them. However, perhaps with preservice teachers it's different. They need a little more guidance on what works in classrooms, what's thought of as innovative, what's going to be the most impressive, what's going to result in better learning... One of the difficulties with this was that I had students ranging from Freshman status to Graduate status, secondary social studies to elementary education majors. I tried to cater to each individual and then find topics that we could all engage in discussions on, and I think we succeeded for many of them. I think that this notion of individualized education plans should apply in our college classes as well. Therefore, my solution to this problem is to create learning contracts based on the NETS ISTE standards and their individual interests. We can create a customizable plan at the beginning of the semester noting the various topics they are interested in, learning goals/objectives, and then designing projects to complete these. This should also deal with the concerns over the lack of flexibility within project/lesson plan design. Examples should be provided, but their final project should be similar to the COATT portfolio, showing how they met the NETS standards with projects they created in this class.

I tried showing Web 2.0 tools, encourgaing them to look at examples that directly pertained to their subject area, but they still don't feel like they learned that much. Hmmm....if I start looking at the NETS ISTE standards, I think I can show them how much they have learned. Perhaps in the context of COATT, they can see that they know more than they think.

Others seemed to note that technology was not really taught in this class. I tried not to "teach" technology because technology is always changing. I think it's silly for us to spend class time on that when they could go out to YouTube to find videos that would help them with this.

So what are some projects that I can have them do as a class? Is this necessary? Can they just communicate via online? I also need to find out if I can make this class meet more than once per week. That may motivate students to participate more. I just had a brainstorm! If I pair up the preservice teachers with a K-12 student in their area, then I could use their lab time as a specified time to meet with me and discuss their progress on a weekly basis. That would be my office hours as well. I think that could work. I still need to think about projects to complete for this course. I'll get back to that later.

Preservice Technology Integration