Scott Hudson

You hear about it frequently:  a person has the desire to work at one occupation but ends up going in a different path for his or her career because of peer or family pressure.  The person is not happy with the choice they made and becomes miserable because of their bad choice or due to the fact that cannot change paths due to family or financial constraints.

I was one of those people for the first part of the scenario.  As a high school student, I liked helping classmates learn math during class periods and enjoyed tutoring friends in whatever class they needed assistance.  An added feature was that I could become a coach.  After all, I was a starter on the basketball team, a good baseball player, and I enjoyed many other athletic endeavors. 

Unfortunately, I chose a different route, business, for a variety of reasons.  First, my friends were planning to enter, allegedly, more glamorous careers such as medicine, business, and law.  Also, I was concerned about the relatively low salaries that teachers were paid.  It did not help me that a one of my teachers spoke poorly about the teaching profession, and my family did not encourage me when I mentioned my idea to them.  

I became a teacher several years after I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, and I strongly believed that this would be the career I would enjoy until I retire.   Teaching was both fun and rewarding, and I was having success teaching and gaining rapport with my students, but by the winter of 2010, my zeal for teaching was waning.  I had begun to get into a rut and teaching and planning was becoming tedious.  Much of this was because lesson planning and daily routines had become monotonous.  I needed to make changes that would help me keep up with current educational practices and to acquire new ideas and skills to use in the classroom.  The desire to make these changes inspired me to work toward my Master’s Degree in Educational Technology (MAET).  

One of the main reasons I chose the MAET program is that there were several options given to me to complete the program.  Of course, there were a few courses that were required but students are given a variety of choices that allow us to fit our needs.  I chose an area that would allow me to improve my technological abilities, develop my subject area knowledge, and give me better classroom management skills. 

All of the courses I took were engaging and helped me grow as a teacher, a learner, and a person, but a few stood out.  The first course I took was Teaching For Understanding With Technology (CEP 810). I thought it was going to be a course where I learned to use Microsoft Word and PowerPoint more effectively, but I was pleasantly surprised that I was incorrect in my prediction.    The most significant topic taught in the class was working effectively together.  Students developed Personal Learning Networks, and it gave us the opportunity to interact with other students online and offline and provided us with a safe environment to learn from others.  Other significant topics taught in the class included Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), which provided knowledge about how to effectively teach using technology, how social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Edutopia, could be utilized to help students learn and help each other succeed in the classroom, and we discovered many free or low cost technologies that teachers and schools can integrate into classrooms and lesson plans.  Ultimately, CEP 810 gave me confidence to believe that I could be successful in the MAET program and gave me practical ideas that can help students learn.

As a high school math teacher, one of the major selling points for me striving for my MAET was that the program offered a course specific to what I was teaching.  That class was Learning Mathematics With Technology (CEP 805).  The major project was a website that provided a library of online resources that included links to and analyses and critiques of multiple math education websites that are aligned to the Common Core.  Additionally, the math websites offer lessons, activities, and assignments.  What impressed me is that we learned much more than about various math websites.  A major subject of the class was relational versus instrumental understanding.  Students gain instrumental understanding through traditional techniques, lecture, modeling, and practice, but we found that students obtain relational understanding when they learn how to do the math through self-directed and continue to retain the information when it takes place in familiar real-life settings.  Technology is a major asset in helping learners achieve relational understanding.  Active learning was another important topic we discussed.  Many students have passed classes without fully grasping what they were taught, but students actively learning in classrooms means that they are able to discuss, critique, and synthesize the material to which they have been exposed.

Modern classrooms are going through significant changes, and the days of teachers standing at the front of the classroom providing direct instruction are over.  CEP 805 was a very influential class for me as it showed me much of the tremendous amount of technology at my disposal.  Since I have been working toward my Master’s degree, I had been integrating much of what I had learned into my classroom, but this course has provided me with a tremendous amount of useful tools that have been incorporated into my lessons on nearly a daily basis.  I have allowed my students to perform more activities that encourage relational understanding of material which is helping many students have increased  enjoyment of math and to retain more of what they have learned.

A great asset in teaching is finding out how students think, and this idea is found in many of the courses I took.  One class in particular was Learning In Schools and Other Settings (CEP 800).  The class gave me the chance to talk to students about how they learn best and make observations of students about how they learn.  The interviews helped better see students’ views about learning and how teachers, particularly those who use direct instruction, can be a barrier to learning because they insist on doing things one way and not being flexible.  For instance, some students like to solve problems on their own.  I can give these students a book or a computer and they enjoy the challenge of teaching themselves how to work out a problem.  Many students enjoy video games and while they do not guarantee success in the classroom, some students are able to maintain more engagement and retain more information by playing learning games.  This is the antithesis of traditional teaching, and due to a lack of control, teachers often have trouble allowing learners to teach themselves.  However, it is important to allow some of this freedom to better maintain student engagement which will help ensure understanding,  and  increase the number of completed assignments. 

The beauty of the class is that it taught us some the psychological aspects of learning while at the same time it showed us how to use new technologies that are  practical for classroom assignments.  My favorite assignment was making a movie that showed me trying to teach my family how to design their own Weebly website.  I went into the assignment planning to provide step by step instructions and to use a whiteboard to instruct them on the proper techniques to complete the site.  As an aid, I typed a “user’s manual”, but it took only a few minutes to determine that a couple of them wanted to pair up to teach themselves how to complete the assignment and another family member did not want anyone to bother him as he chose to figure out the process himself. 

CEP 800 has been very influential on my teaching.  The results of my findings has led me try to learn more about how my students learn, to allow students to be more independent and to offer more differentiation tools to the kids.  Other results that have resulted from topics I have learned from this class are that I have made a few video lessons, used stations to provide more technology options for kids, and offered more options for assignments.

When I started the Educational Technology Master’s degree program, I considered my knowledge of technology to be above average.  I was fairly proficient with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and I was (in my own mind) good at surfing the web.    I did not believe it was possible to design my own webpage without having knowledge of computer code, and while I had experience with teaching a class using cooperative learning to allow students to own more of their learning and to discover math techniques, I did not think that there was software available to help provide similar differentiation in my lessons and to allow students to learn problem solving techniques on their own.  Also, I was also skeptical about the need for students to reflect and synthesize their learning through writing because, after all, I was a math teacher not an English teacher. 

The beauty of the Educational Technology Master’s program is that not only was I proven incorrect about the amount of technology at my disposal, but I found that writing reflections about my learning and synthesizing the knowledge I had gained was extremely valuable.  The sum of all of the positives of the MAET program came together in the final course I took to complete my Master’s degree:  Capstone Project (CEP 807).  The designers of the course did a great job of giving students choices for completing their final assignment, provided opportunities for cooperative group work, video chats with instructors, peer criticism, reflection, synthesis, and a verbal and written presentation of what we had learned, and all of these are suggested techniques for all teachers to use in their own classrooms.

The final assignment for this course was to create an online portfolio in the form of a website.  While I had gained experience designing a website on Weebly.com, I challenged myself by using a different website design program, Wix.com.  For one of the initial assignments, the instructors of the course required us to view portfolios from former MAET and Master’s of Arts in Education (MAED) students, and contact one of the former students to ask questions about anything regarding his or her portfolio.  I focused on why my person chose the Wix.com format.  Additionally, I was required weekly or biweekly to add a portion to my website, including a writing a resume, composing a reflection of the work I have done during my time in the program, and authoring a synthesis essay that summed up all of the lessons I learned in completing my Masters.  Additionally, each week I had to observe other CEP 807 students’ portfolios and give my cohorts constructive criticism and positive comments, but more importantly I was able to receive similar feedback, which helped ease my nervousness and improved my work.  The professors and teaching assistants did a great job of helping me succeed and showing they cared about me and the other students in the by offering video office hours and writing multiple emails each week.    

In conclusion, as a high school teacher for almost 15 years, I saw it was time for me to develop myself professionally and give myself a fresh start.  I had been to many workshops where the speakers talked to me about the evolution of education, technology use, classroom management and many other topics, but instead of the presenters teaching me in the techniques of today, they taught me using the traditional techniques that the lecturer was discouraging.  I chose Michigan State University’s Master’s of Educational Technology because I enjoyed working with technology, saw learning technology as a chance to make the classes I was teaching more interesting, and to complete the state of Michigan’s requirement to complete a certain number of post-Bachelor’s degree classes.  Not only did I fulfill these requirements, but I learned much more.  Amongst many other great things, my professors and teaching assistants did a fantastic job of modeling technologies, requiring me to use a variety of technologies that will aid student learning and my teaching, providing me with tools to better manage my classroom, helping me design more engaging lesson plans, and most importantly, helped me see all students learn differently.