 Hello, and welcome to Reinventing Preservice Teacher Technology Courses, a presentation that is a panel presentation for the 2015 K-12 online conference. My name is Wes Friar, and I am very excited to have this opportunity to facilitate this unique presentation. You know, in most of our colleges of education, we have at least one course that is dedicated to technology integration, and the composition of that course and what that looks like in different colleges varies. And so our goal in this presentation was to bring together several different faculty members who are teaching that technology integration course, or other courses related to technology integration, and then ask them to reflect on some of the challenges as well as rewarding parts of that experience, and also some of the ways in which they have changed and developed the projects that they ask students to complete. So my name is Wes Friar. I have been a Preservice Teacher Educator at three different universities over the past five years, and I'm not currently teaching Preservice Teachers, but you're about to hear from Cindy Danarkoon at Kansas State in Manhattan, Kansas, Dean Mantz who teaches at Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas, and Kirby Alexander who teaches at TCU in the Dallas area. Rather than get together for a synchronous Google Hangout, we actually asked each of our panelists to record answers to the presentation questions, and then upload those as unlisted videos to YouTube, and then we have combined those into the single video that you are watching now. So without further ado, we're going to begin with some introductions from our three panelists. I am Cindy Danarkoon from Kansas State University. I teach technology in the College of Education. I have students when they first enter the teacher education program here at Kansas State University. So I basically have them their very first semester in the College of Education. I've taught for an eternity, too many years to even count at this point. My K-12 background was high school. I taught English, Journalism, Graphic Design, Photography, and Art. Basically my passion was Journalism over the years, and it's kind of how I arrived at this whole tech thing. It kind of surprises me sometimes when I say I'm teaching technology because I would have never predicted that for myself. But I love every minute of it because every day it's new and different and exciting. We all talk about as educators we're lifelong learners, and I actually feel like I can say that with confidence, I'm a lifelong learner. I probably learn something new every day. Hello everyone. My name is Dean Mantz. I've been a pre-service education professor for Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas for eight years. And the course that I've been teaching is technology in the classroom, where typically I'll have freshmen, sophomores, occasionally a junior or a senior sprinkled in. I've also taught this class online and face-to-face. It's interesting how my mixture of students each semester would vary in the fact that with our college offering PE and health as a major, there may be times where I'm predominantly looking at a student ratio with a major PE being the majority of my class compared to other semesters. Maybe some semesters I would have predominant elementary majors. My name is Kirby Alexander. I'm an assistant professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. I teach a class called Digital Communication and Collaboration. It's a graduate level course intended for upper level undergrads as well as our accelerated master's students who have just finished their student teaching and they're staying one extra year for their master's degree. I also teach the Intro to Education course here and a variety of methods courses in the middle secondary program. Most of our students are between 18 and 22. The majority of them go into the classroom as soon as they graduate. A few do stay for our accelerated master's program and then they go into teaching. Overall, it's a great place to teach. All of our courses are face-to-face. We have no online or hybrid courses and it's a great place to learn how to be a teacher. Well, now that we have met our panelists, we'll go ahead and move to question one. And the first question is, what are the projects or units that you include in your courses for pre-service teachers focused on technology integration and why do you include those projects? Projects and units that I do in my class, they vary widely. We are a one-to-one iPad school so we provide every one of our students at Kansas State in the College of Ed with an iPad to use. So right now we're probably concentrating a little more on iPads and how we use those in the classroom than anything else. So I've sort of divided it up into units. For example, this past week we've learned to use some not notation apps. For example, with the iPad, everybody's big question is, okay, we're all going paperless but now how the heck do I grade papers on it? So they're critiquing each other's websites and are using an annotation app. For each unit I do, I create a little mini iBook. For example, the last one was about annotation apps, there were 10 or 12 apps in there to choose from. I always put my favorite app first, which is Notability, and encourage my students to use it but if they want to jump across and use a free app, they can do that. So my projects each week, it's to expose them to a new app or a tool or a website and they have to create a project with it just like they would do with their own students and then reflect on how they used it, what they liked about it, what they didn't like about it, what was hard, what was easy, how would they use this in the classroom, what's the application of education. Everything has to fit into that. We're trying to lay the groundwork for them to use their iPads in their other courses. So I'm kind of the first line of defense to get them up to speed on using the technology so that when that next instructor in another class in the College of Ed asks them to use to do a project, they just immediately know what app to use or what website to go to and they can just jump right in and get it done. So including the things that I do in class have a specific reason. It's either because it's something I've seen used in schools out in the field or because one of my colleagues teaching one of the methods classes needs the students to know how to use that particular tool to accomplish a task in their class. Some of the projects that I do in my technology in the classroom course were focused around the national educational standards or NETs at one time. So NETs T, but basically now are called the ISTI standards. So we would look at social media, how to use Twitter, Facebook, those type of discussions in the classroom would actually participate in Twitter chats. We'd use Edmodo, Google Apps for Education, you know, a lot of things where they would use and become familiar with it in preparation for their own classroom and a lot of those would also include digital storytelling, infographics, podcasting, video creation, public service announcements, green screens, but different things that get the kids creative thinking allowing for their voice to be heard so they could then in turn think of some creative engaging activities to use with their own students in the future. For the projects I use in my digital communication and collaboration class I try to start with the question what do you want to do with technology in your classroom not what tool do you want to learn how to use. It's easy to jump from tool to tool. I try to focus more on teaching strategies and pedagogical approaches. Most of my projects are actually centered around media and then from there we look at what you can do with those media in the classroom. So we look at digital video, cloud computing, social networking tools, video conferencing tools, tools you might use in a bring your own device or one to one environment for syncing the class or getting feedback from the class. So we do look at specific tools but it's within the context of instruction. I have found that tools are going to change, technology keeps getting better and better, faster and faster, more and more mobile, more and more accessible. So tools are going to change. What's not going to change in many cases are the pedagogical outcomes and decisions that teachers are making. What do they want to do? What are they trying to extend or augment or enhance the technology in their instruction? So that is really what anchors the projects that we do in this class. All right well now that we've heard those great answers we will move on to our second question which is how have you changed your approach to pre-service educational technology teacher education in the past five years and how do you want your courses to evolve and change in upcoming years? Oh my approach in my course I would say it has changed over the last more than 10 years drastically. The iPads have given it a huge change but more and more students are taking my class online rather than on campus. Some of them want that face to face. They want to see an example of how to do it. They want the step by step and some of them feel like they can do it online themselves. The biggest thing I would say with the online is I don't know how many undergraduates are really ready for that online environment. The fact that they have to be diligent and make themselves sit down and work on it every single day. That's a tough task for a lot of undergraduates. I find they get behind then they stress themselves out with it. The other things that have changed I used to have my students all purchase web space to create their portfolio website on and then I've moved to using free tools. I even jumped in with both feet one semester and let them pick whatever tool they wanted to use from Google sites to various blogging tools to iWeb to whatever we could find that was free and did a little experiment that semester. Holy moly that was a dumb decision. So I think we're always constantly learning about the decisions we make in our courses and what we're doing. So a couple of semesters ago West Friar who's involved in this presentation to talk to me into trying kit blog which I really liked. But for my students it didn't have quite enough robust features. Although it was really good for them to see how they could use it as a classroom teacher and that's my goal. Every tool that we're using and everything that we do in class is in it because this is something they could do when they get out in the field in their own classrooms. So now I've moved to using edgy blogs which I'm liking. I think their setups a little funky. I it's a little complicated in that respect. It could be simpler. But I like the tool that's based on WordPress. It's more or less free. I mean I pay the paid subscription so my students can all have the advanced features for things they want to do. But it's working quite nicely for what we're doing. I keep thinking I need to give my students a choice but that's probably the biggest change I've made. I'm really diligent about wanting them to use tools they could use in their own classrooms and trying to demonstrate them in that way of how they would use them. I'm also trying not to be quite the enabler I used to be when a student would email me a question. I didn't variably give them step by step answers. When truthfully the answer is always on our course website. We happen to be using Canvas which is kind of like Blackboard which is like Moodle which is like a hundred others. But the answer is always there. So I think one of the biggest things that's changed is the fact that students, they don't read instructions very well. They kind of skim over them and think they can figure it out. And many times they can figure it out which is awesome. But when they can't figure it out they've got to learn that I have to stop being an enabler. They've got to learn to go find the answer themselves and figure out how to do it because when they get out there in the classroom there isn't going to be a Cindy there to help them every time they get stuck with technology. So I'm really I guess the thing that I'm changing the most about what I'm doing and how I'm evolving is trying not to be such an enabler. I'm really making huge use of social media in my classes. And the thing that shocks me is I'm really having to push my students to use the social media to use Twitter to use Pinterest to use a variety of other things. It's interesting. People say, oh, these colleges, they probably know how to do everything. Oh, heavens to Betsy, they don't. So it's an eye opener. I really thought they would be more skilled at some of the social media things that we're trying to use. But boy for me, social media is my professional development every day when I have time. You know, what I've previously done with the technology in the classroom on campus courses was first started out with where I dictated kind of the curriculum. And as time evolved and the courses evolved and I become more comfortable with it, I loosened up and then really took the approach of keeping in mind the student voice where I tried to make it more student centered where the students had input on the process of what we did project wise, the products that were created from the various projects and the content that we covered by opening the first night with a survey and then building the projects in the curriculum that we'd cover that semester based off the student interest stuff that they would find interesting in that they wanted to learn about and use in their future classrooms. You know, what I really like to see technology in the classroom evolve into is where the students become more engaged with other pre-service students around the country, around the globe and do more collaborative projects so they understand that communication, collaboration, creativity, digital citizenship and all when they're ready to go to the classroom. In the last five years and really even more than that, my approach to teaching pre-service teachers how to use technology in their classroom has changed tremendously. I think if you were to line up my syllabi side by side from my first class till now, you would see very few similarities. You might even wonder if it's the same person that wrote those. Early on, I was very tool centered, wanted to teach how to use all the features of PowerPoint and movie maker and iMovie and a host of other tools that I had available at that time. Now I tend to focus more on concepts and strategies. What can you do with with different tools? What are pedagogical outcomes you're hoping to achieve? And what are the tools that help you do that? In the future, you know, I would like to include more projects that have students out in schools implementing projects they've created with technology with students and teachers. I've done that before. It's rewarding. It's a rich learning experience. It provides many opportunities for reflection and revision. I really think that's a big piece of learning how to teach with technology is the reflection piece, not just going out there and having an experience, but reflecting on it and revising and doing it again. And it seems like so many times the projects that I've done in the past in my ed tech classes have been just focused on getting the project done and moving on to the next project. And there really hasn't been that that reflection on not just what did I do wrong with with creating something with technology, but what went wrong trying to implement it? What what can I learn from that? And how can I do it better next time? I really think when you have those kinds of rich experiences, you can not only learn how to teach better, but you can also learn the tool better. So that would be something I hope to do in the future. Well, this presentation has actually gone by pretty quickly and we needed to stay confined to the 20 minute guideline for the K-12 online conference. But certainly probably have more ideas and questions going through our heads as a result of recording these videos and putting these together. Then we've had time to actually put into this presentation. So I'd like to close with a two part challenge for you if you are involved in pre-service or in-service teacher education, focusing on technology integration. I would love it if you would send me a tweet to W. Friar and I'm going to put together a Twitter list that we can use to connect other pre-service teacher educators that are involved in technology integration. And so we'll share that out as a link. You can find that in the supplementary materials for this presentation for K-12 online. And one of the great things about a Twitter list is not only can you view that in Twitter, but you can also open that up in a program like Flipboard on your phone or your tablet. And that's a great way to get ideas and then just stay connected. So that's challenge number one. The second part of our challenge is actually to record a video, much like you've seen us do in this presentation. Just take your smartphone, grab your tablet. You know, if somebody recorded for yourself or you can hold it for yourself as I'm doing for this video right here. But if you'd like, you know, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your teaching context and then respond to one or both of these questions. Talking about the projects or units that you include as you teach your pre-service teachers, why you feel those are important and you include those. And then also the ways in which your pre-service teacher syllabus, the ways that you teach your class has changed and evolved. I also hope that you'll take time to connect to Cindy, connect to Dean, connect to Kirby and connect to me as well. And let us know the kinds of things that you are grappling with as you work with pre-service teachers or in service teachers with respect to technology integration. So thanks so much for your attendance and we look forward to hopefully hearing back from you either as a comment on this post on the K-12 online conference blog, on the YouTube video or via Twitter. Thanks.