Capstone Project

Context

Describe the target audience for this series (grade level bands, parents, community members, admin, other teachers at a conference, museum staff, employees, adult learners, colleagues in what industry).

I will be providing a series of professional development opportunities for the teachers in my rural, Maine K-8 school. This will be open to classroom teachers, specialists and support staff. The teachers have a wide range of comfort with technology and one goal identified by the staff and administrators is to incorporate technology into the day to day lives of their students, to better prepare them to be digitally literate and good digital citizens. 

What is a topic you’d like to tackle with colleagues that involves technology integration and education/industry learning?

I would like to provide training for educators by focusing on digital citizenship and utilizing Minecraft Education to support their teaching plan for the upcoming school year. Minecraft Education is designed to help students build creativity, problem solving, and collaboration skills by incorporating real-world issues, computational thinking, and principles of digital citizenship.

What is the evidence that there is a need or a problem in this area?

Children need to learn digital citizenship, they cannot do this if they do not have an opportunity to spend time in the digital world. Additionally, teachers are heavily burdened with a great number of standards and goals to meet over the course of the school year - they are not able to take time away from their teaching to add new content to their curriculum. Minecraft solves this problem by providing a way for students to learn digital citizenship while working on the content that is already being taught in their classrooms. 

How will you design the professional development so it is about an idea (digital citizenship, engagement, autonomy, global collaboration) not about a tool?

While this professional development is about Minecraft Education, which some may view as a tool, it is really opening up a venue for teachers to engage students in the principles of digital citizenship and collaboration while they are teaching the math, reading, or other academic subjects that students need to learn. While some aspects of the professional development will necessarily be teaching educators how to use the tool, it will really be opening up a world of opportunities to teach digital citizenship and collaboration to their students.

Resources

Provide 10 resources for your colleagues on this topic - for each, provide the link, and a two-to-three sentence description of the resource.

• This video from Edutopia is a great resource to share with staff members as part of the initial invitation to learn more about teaching digital citizenship through MEd. It provides a good introduction to the concept of teaching using games and why this is important to children living in the 21st century. It also gives a little background into the development of Minecraft Ecuation.
• This video demonstrates how a school district has incorporated Minecraft into the daily life of their classroom and how it has redefined how they approach teaching and learning in the digital age.
• This video shows an elementary school math class using Minecraft to learn their multiplication and division facts.
• This video shows an elementary school science class learning about and exploring food chains using Minecraft. 
• This video shows how Special Education or ESL students may be supported while using Minecraft through immersive reading and translation tools. 
• This lesson plan created by Minecraft Education is a whole creative writing unit that can be used to guide children through the process of writing a fairy tale. 
• This lesson plan created by Cambridge Mathematics for use on Minecraft Education reinforces the concepts of shapes, symmetry, and spatial reasoning  while students explore the world of ancient Egypt. 
• This learning pathway by Minecraft Teacher Academy lays out the perfect next steps for teachers interested in continuing this training beyond the initial professional development and prepares them to create lessons for their own classroom teaching.
• Teachers can use this link to explore a myriad of pre-made lessons to use with their students.
• Teachers often want to keep parents as involved as possible in their child’s education. This link provides resources for parents about Minecraft Education and how parents can support the development of digital citizenship using Minecraft at home.

Digital Citizenship

What are two elements of digital citizenship that you will focus on during this professional development? Please describe why you selected and how you’ll address.

While my focus is on digital citizenship in general, I will highlight two aspects of digital citizenship in particular: digital communication and digital rights and responsibilities. I plan on addressing the topic of digital citizenship at our first session, introducing my reason for providing this professional development as a way of promoting education in digital citizenship for our students. Throughout the 3 sessions I will return frequently to the topics of communication and rights and responsibilities and highlight ways teachers can utilize teachable moments to draw students’ attention to the need for safe digital communication and how to protect their own rights online. There are countless ways to teach students to be responsible for themselves and their friends in an online setting and I want teachers to be prepared to use those moments whenever they arise. 

Provide at least one handout that you created for your colleagues with regards to your two elements of digital citizenship 

Session Design and Delivery

Design a Google Form (or comparable tool) to assess what your colleagues already know about the topic, and what skill level they have with any tools.

Pre-Survey Google Form

Please answer the following questions.  

• What evidence in the professional development suggests that the learning environment supports andragogical principles?

As our readings suggested, one principle of andragogy is that adult learners tend to be more self-motivated and seek out learning that they believe will be useful or fulfilling. By providing information about my training by email and offering it as an option over the course of several weeks, rather than a required learning for teachers to have no interest in it, I hope to welcome a group of educators who are self-motivated, interested in the content, and dedicated to the challenge of learning a new skill. In addition, adults want to be responsible for their own learning. By utilizing my time to introduce teachers to the digital citizenship concepts of communication, rights, and responsibilities and how Minecraft Education can dually support them in the application of those skills and in their daily lessons, I am hopeful that they will take the next steps to do the training tutorials themselves and receive the certifications offered by the Minecraft Teacher Academy. 

• In what ways does this tap into, and extend adult learner interest or institutional (education or industry) goals?

The teachers and administrators of my school have highlighted digital citizenship as a priority for the upcoming school year - offering this training will be one opportunity for teachers to start on the pathway to meeting that goal. 

• How does the environment and unit offer a variety of ways to explore and express ideas? 

Teachers will be able to talk with their neighbors and table groups throughout the training sessions, They will be able to watch demonstrations, try things out on their own, ask questions freely, and discuss ideas with one another.

• What structures and tools will you use to enable your learners to work collegially and to contribute to the community of learners?

Participants will sit in tables of four, each with their school-issued laptops. The tables will be angled so that all of the educators will be able to see the front of the room and the presentation will be up on the projector.

Invitation to Learn

Design an invitation to a professional development series

Instructional Aids & Supporting Documents

Please create the supplemental slides for at least one 45 min-1 hour section of your professional development.  please hyperlink below:

Provide at least three handouts, visuals, or videos that you have created for the learning, please hyperlink below:

How will you know if your sessions reach the goals? Design a tool to help you gather this information from your learners?

Post-Survey Google Form

Self Assessment

How is this professional development different than what you would have planned prior to EDT 520? 

Before taking EDT 520, I was unfamiliar with many of the different tools and techniques that i have used throughout this professional development. I had no experience with Canva and would not have been able to use it to create the presentation or handouts. I had very little understanding of the components of digital citizenship and would not have been able to convey a helpful definition of any of them to my colleagues. I was also unfamiliar with the need to make my presentation more dynamic by offering opportunities for different modalities and instructional techniques. Understanding the differences in pedagogy and andragogy enabled me to design a lesson plan that allowed for the independence and student-led nature of adult education. I also learned the value of allowing the participants to spend time exploring a new tool and giving them opportunities to talk about it and learn from one another’s experiences.

In this project I hope that you will have the opportunity to show mastery of at least four of these outcomes.  Please mark the four you feel you best demonstrate with this project in the column to the right.

Below, please articulate where and how your work showcases mastery of these outcomes.  Please make sure to cite at least four connections to readings or videos from class that show your depth of knowledge in these areas. 

“Demonstrate fluency with new educational tools, and articulate the affordances and constraints  of such tools to support educational practice.” - I have met this goal by learning a new educational tool, Canva, and have utilized it to create dynamic educational materials to enhance the learning experiences of the learning community. This website, linked in Week 3, helped me to get started on my Canva journey. I used Canva to make my handouts and my presentation. 

“Plan for educational experience (of adult learners) that demonstrates the ability to use educational technology, sound educational philosophy, and plan for local context.” - I have met this goal by creating a lesson plan for a 5 hour professional development course for my colleagues about Digital Citizenship and Minecraft Education. I planned this course specifically to fulfill the goals of my local administration to increase student instruction in the area of digital citizenship. I also used sound educational philosophy in my planning for adult learning, as noted in this article from Week 4, adults thrive when their learning is self-directed. I designed my professional development course to give many opportunities for educators to follow their own lines of inquiry. I also used Minecraft Education, a complex and exciting form of educational technology, and took several Minecraft tutorial courses in order to prepare for this professional development.

“Through various modalities engage in reflective practice and goal setting.” - Throughout my professional development course I embedded a variety of opportunities for myself and my participants to participate in reflective practices and set goals. By assigning a pre-survey to inform my instruction for Days 2 and 3, providing a goal-setting worksheet, providing opportunities for small group discussion and sharing, and a final post-survey, I have given both myself and my colleagues the opportunity to reflect on our learning in a variety of ways and make changes to our instructional plan accordingly. I found Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction from Week 11 to be a useful thought-exercise as I created this professional development - particularly the steps about providing feedback and assessing performance.

“Engage with peers and professional learning network through a variety of modalities to lead and contribute to discussion on educational technology to support deeper reasoning.” - I found the collaborative work work my PLN in Week 12 to be a very useful exercise for me as I developed this professional development lesson. Sharing my thoughts and ideas and receiving feedback from them was very helpful. Creating connections was a useful aspect in the development of this project, as highlighted in this article from Week 6.