3.2 Managing Digital Tools and Resources
Candidates effectively manage digital tools and resources within the context of student learning experiences. (PSC 3.2/ISTE 3b)
ITEC 7445
Multimedia Design Project
The Multimedia Design Project (MDP) in ITEC 7445 was a chance to expand my skills in website building, particularly for the purpose of creating online content that can be used in a face-to-face or blended learning classroom environment. The MDP resulted in a website whose pages are sequenced so as to teach students about visual rhetoric and to assign them a task to create their own piece of visual rhetoric which delivers a persuasive message using images, whether digital or published in paper form. The Project allowed me to learn how to manage digital resources for maximum instructional impact and to leverage the use of digital tools to encourage authentic student products which demonstrate the expected learning. I embedded the website and the supplementary teaching material onto our LMS so that students could access the learning content outside of class and then come to class prepared to work on the more challenging task of creation with a digital tool such as Canva, Piktochart or Adobe to demonstrate their own learning in a persuasive visual piece.
Management of digital resources includes the art of knowing when to use them in a blended classroom environment. Instruction with digital tools must be managed so as to promote student engagement but to also cover new and rigorous content. It is not enough to give students a website and expect them to produce a well-designed piece of visual rhetoric. I considered the skills necessary for students to become proficient at the task of analyzing visual rhetoric. The MDP includes steps where students are asked to learn the content of the AP Language and Composition course and to be assessed before moving on to design or creation which are higher up on Bloom’s taxonomy. So, The MDP includes a supplementary video which teaches a short lesson on how to read visual rhetoric. The video I made for that lesson uses the digital resources we have like our online AP Language and Composition textbook and our Discussion board and assessment widget on the LMS. I used the resources to check the progress of student skills as we learned what creates visual rhetoric. Each “page” of the website was set up to sequence an instructional stopping point that is mirrored in the LMS so that I could effectively monitor students’ skills progress. Managing digital resources also calls for making decisions about which content to cover face-to-face and which content to let students explore on their own. Embedding videos and using online instructional materials aids in teaching the steps of this project. The project itself gave me an opportunity to make those decisions, mainly because I already knew that a website cannot completely instruct students to mastery.
Management of digital tools includes provision of physical tools to do the work as well as instructing students in the precautions necessary to generate their own product in a safe, legal, and professional way. So, a large project such as this one requires planning and management of the actual devices we use. In our school, 16 Chromebooks per cart have been provided to some select teachers who offer to host the carts in the building. If a teacher needs those resources, she must sign them out and plan for their use. If she needs more than one cart to suit the number of students in her classroom, she must plan in advance and check out two carts. Managing digital tools is my job, and ensuring that we have connectivity and reliable devices throughout the project is essential to its success.
More importantly, I needed to instruct students how to manage digital tools and resources in a safe, ethical, and legal way. ISTE’s Digital Citizen standards for students includes the expectation that students manage a digital identity, that they engage in ethical behavior, and that they are aware of intellectual property rights when using digital resources on the Internet, especially (ISTE, 2019). So, part of my instruction to the students were digital copyright rules, as well as how to filter image searches in Google to result in acceptable content to add to their own creations. This project also allows for the opportunity for students to decide which messages are ethical and helpful to their community and which ones will create a positive digital trail for them in the future. Finally, the management of digital tools in the classroom includes instructing students how to choose the right tools for their desired outcome while maintaining their privacy rights. Thus, the project induced me to lead students through a tool selection process and then into instructing small-groups of students who all chose the same digital tool. ISTE’s Innovative Designer standard calls for students to engage in deliberate design of a product using a digital tool, as well to select a tool which manages risks and opportunities for creation. The MDP engages those standards for students and helps me to reiterate their importance to my teachers.
When I created the MDP, I did not plan for making sure connectivity was assured and devices were not being used during the testing window. In our school, most students have smartphones, but they do not have large-device computing access with their own devices. Most of the work we do on devices is performed on school devices. Therefore, when I think about the files that need to be created and the logon access needed for the project, I conclude that we need devices and online tools that have cloud storage instead of hard file storage. I did not plan for the amount of hard-storage files that the project created, though. So I’d adjust the project so that it only took advantage of cloud-storage files and not hard storage needs. Further, I’d make sure a teacher knows how to manipulate Weebly to alter her content to differentiate for her students. I learned that teachers didn’t necessarily know how to use Weebly to make a learning tool. So, I need to follow up with this artifact with some training on how to use weebly. I plan on making a template with the set-up of pages in a sequence and then let the teachers alter it to their own content.
The students who used the website and the accompanying instructional sources reported that they were engaged in the learning of the content because it gave them a digital tool to learn from and a digital tool to choose to demonstrate their learning. Then, the teachers who used the unit for their AP Language classes reported that their students showed a greater ability to express rhetorical appropriateness through visual means than through written means. Then, when they asked their students to write about visual rhetoric the writing about the explanation got better after doing this project. Teachers suspected that the creation of the visual product at the end of the unit cemented learning about purposeful visual choices.
References
ISTE (2019). ISTE standards for students. Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students.
Multimedia Design Project
The Multimedia Design Project (MDP) in ITEC 7445 was a chance to expand my skills in website building, particularly for the purpose of creating online content that can be used in a face-to-face or blended learning classroom environment. The MDP resulted in a website whose pages are sequenced so as to teach students about visual rhetoric and to assign them a task to create their own piece of visual rhetoric which delivers a persuasive message using images, whether digital or published in paper form. The Project allowed me to learn how to manage digital resources for maximum instructional impact and to leverage the use of digital tools to encourage authentic student products which demonstrate the expected learning. I embedded the website and the supplementary teaching material onto our LMS so that students could access the learning content outside of class and then come to class prepared to work on the more challenging task of creation with a digital tool such as Canva, Piktochart or Adobe to demonstrate their own learning in a persuasive visual piece.
Management of digital resources includes the art of knowing when to use them in a blended classroom environment. Instruction with digital tools must be managed so as to promote student engagement but to also cover new and rigorous content. It is not enough to give students a website and expect them to produce a well-designed piece of visual rhetoric. I considered the skills necessary for students to become proficient at the task of analyzing visual rhetoric. The MDP includes steps where students are asked to learn the content of the AP Language and Composition course and to be assessed before moving on to design or creation which are higher up on Bloom’s taxonomy. So, The MDP includes a supplementary video which teaches a short lesson on how to read visual rhetoric. The video I made for that lesson uses the digital resources we have like our online AP Language and Composition textbook and our Discussion board and assessment widget on the LMS. I used the resources to check the progress of student skills as we learned what creates visual rhetoric. Each “page” of the website was set up to sequence an instructional stopping point that is mirrored in the LMS so that I could effectively monitor students’ skills progress. Managing digital resources also calls for making decisions about which content to cover face-to-face and which content to let students explore on their own. Embedding videos and using online instructional materials aids in teaching the steps of this project. The project itself gave me an opportunity to make those decisions, mainly because I already knew that a website cannot completely instruct students to mastery.
Management of digital tools includes provision of physical tools to do the work as well as instructing students in the precautions necessary to generate their own product in a safe, legal, and professional way. So, a large project such as this one requires planning and management of the actual devices we use. In our school, 16 Chromebooks per cart have been provided to some select teachers who offer to host the carts in the building. If a teacher needs those resources, she must sign them out and plan for their use. If she needs more than one cart to suit the number of students in her classroom, she must plan in advance and check out two carts. Managing digital tools is my job, and ensuring that we have connectivity and reliable devices throughout the project is essential to its success.
More importantly, I needed to instruct students how to manage digital tools and resources in a safe, ethical, and legal way. ISTE’s Digital Citizen standards for students includes the expectation that students manage a digital identity, that they engage in ethical behavior, and that they are aware of intellectual property rights when using digital resources on the Internet, especially (ISTE, 2019). So, part of my instruction to the students were digital copyright rules, as well as how to filter image searches in Google to result in acceptable content to add to their own creations. This project also allows for the opportunity for students to decide which messages are ethical and helpful to their community and which ones will create a positive digital trail for them in the future. Finally, the management of digital tools in the classroom includes instructing students how to choose the right tools for their desired outcome while maintaining their privacy rights. Thus, the project induced me to lead students through a tool selection process and then into instructing small-groups of students who all chose the same digital tool. ISTE’s Innovative Designer standard calls for students to engage in deliberate design of a product using a digital tool, as well to select a tool which manages risks and opportunities for creation. The MDP engages those standards for students and helps me to reiterate their importance to my teachers.
When I created the MDP, I did not plan for making sure connectivity was assured and devices were not being used during the testing window. In our school, most students have smartphones, but they do not have large-device computing access with their own devices. Most of the work we do on devices is performed on school devices. Therefore, when I think about the files that need to be created and the logon access needed for the project, I conclude that we need devices and online tools that have cloud storage instead of hard file storage. I did not plan for the amount of hard-storage files that the project created, though. So I’d adjust the project so that it only took advantage of cloud-storage files and not hard storage needs. Further, I’d make sure a teacher knows how to manipulate Weebly to alter her content to differentiate for her students. I learned that teachers didn’t necessarily know how to use Weebly to make a learning tool. So, I need to follow up with this artifact with some training on how to use weebly. I plan on making a template with the set-up of pages in a sequence and then let the teachers alter it to their own content.
The students who used the website and the accompanying instructional sources reported that they were engaged in the learning of the content because it gave them a digital tool to learn from and a digital tool to choose to demonstrate their learning. Then, the teachers who used the unit for their AP Language classes reported that their students showed a greater ability to express rhetorical appropriateness through visual means than through written means. Then, when they asked their students to write about visual rhetoric the writing about the explanation got better after doing this project. Teachers suspected that the creation of the visual product at the end of the unit cemented learning about purposeful visual choices.
References
ISTE (2019). ISTE standards for students. Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students.