Week 10 

Resources and Infographic

This week we read Ch. 7 and 8 from the book, "The Edtech Advocate's Guide to Leading Change in Schools" by Mark Gura.  These are the final chapters in the book and contain some great resources especially in Chapter 8.  I am going to subscribe to some of the newsletters and articles online as suggested. 

A few suggestions I am thinking about are:

• Edtech Update at www.edtechupdate.com
• Smart Brief on Edtech at www.smartbrief.com/industry/education/
• Free Tech 4 Teachers at www.freetech4teachers.com
• Creative Educator at creativeeducator.tech4learning.com 

A couple of key points that were "WOW" factors for me:

1. "Digital transformation then, is the state of schools changing themselves to better accomplish their goals."

2. "With the advent and adoption of technology, a far greater variety of more elaborate activities are now practical to implement, thus transforming teaching and learning."

One of our assignments this week was to create a "Big Picture" Representation to plot the kinds of edtech resources and practices available and currently in use for ourselves and to share with the community we serve.  Below is my "Big Picture" Representation.

This was not an easy task to accomplish!  First, we were to create a list of items associated with school technology.  Below are my lists of Edtech resources and Practices that I began with.

 

#2 Create a flowchart of how technology is used in schools and how it is integrated into the curriculum. Then I opened the software Canva and became hung up on the word "flowchart" from the directions.  I just couldn't see how flowchart would allow my "Big Picture" idea to work.  I then considered a fishbone diagram and worked on that for a while, but again it just didn't work for me.  I then thought about how technology is learned about by the teacher through the types of Edtech and the practices of Edtech which were already represented in my lists.  I really wanted a diagram more along the line of a Family tree I thought.  I tried to work that representation for awhile-again I just couldn't get it to work.  Then I began creating the Edtech Practices as main areas with the Edtech Resources coming from the different types of Practices. The final "Big Picture" came together. These resources and practices are mainly what I utilize in my K-12 classroom.