Jonathan M. Gere
Teacher/Artist/Good Guy
This page gives a summary of all the electronic tools and programs that I gained an understanding of. These tools proved to be helpful to me in both as a learner and an educator. These programs range from editing software to collaborative document creation and work. The tools on this page are ones that I continue to use to this day and have helped transform my classroom into more of a 21st century learning environment. These tools are still ones I use today to help continue to develop my digital teaching and learning, implementing new and interesting ways to gather and display knowledge.
For this project myself and three other partners researched into what problem were effecting education now and looked into possible solutions. This involved us breaking down various parts of what did and did not work in education, then from there building a metaphorical foundation in which we could build our ideas and theories off. For this we wrote summative and reflective papers on various research materials and articles, then compiled all out information into one final video, which can be found here.
This is helpful as a educator because it gave me more of an insight to what the digital world has to offer and the multitude of answers it can provide for the questions I, or any other learner, has. From this I was able to look at how I had been tackling learning issues in my own classroom and then applying some of the learned knowledge.
As students, were tasked with learning how to do something that we had no previous knowledge in but were interested in learning how to do. This task sent me out on learning through research on the internet, gathering resources and materials, practicing, and much much more. This taught me to be self-sufficient learners and how to guide our own learning, teaching us how good practices and allowing us to be able to provide tips and tricks to our own students because of our own experiences. Whit this I was able to hone my skills in re-purposing medias, materials, and programs to do different things, giving me experience in making non-pertinent objects pertinent and ready to assimilate into any learning situation. This gave me an enlightening experience in self-guided learning. From this I was able to look at key parts that helped get me motivated to learn, what did not work for me, and everything in-between. I am now able to differentiate my teaching in order to help support and guide intrinsic learning in my classroom.
Showcase
This page will showcase all the work that I produced through continuing my education, my other teaching experiences, as well as what skills and experiences I was able to take away and assimilate into my teaching methods. I have divided this page into five sections, one for each of my educational ventures. The first being my Year One of my Master’s Program, this is followed by Year two, then the third section will provide examples of my work in CEP 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning, section four will give a introduction to the online teaching lesson I designed in my Online Teaching course, CEP 820, then finally the fifth portion will be dedicated to my personal growth as a teacher and inclusion of various 21st century learning and teaching techniques, topics, and exercises.
Each section will contain summaries of key projects, lessons, and exercises that helped create the educator and learner that I am today, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. Along with those I will also discuss how these classes have made me a better teacher and what I intend to do with these newly learned skill. Click on each section heading to link to a page that contain an all my work for that specific section, and you can do the same for some of the summaries of each topic covered too.
This link leads you to a video of a webinar my partners and I hosted that covered digital equity and healthy practices using technology in education. For this webinar we had to familiarize ourselves with the topic(s), gather guests to participate in our webinar, then finaly develop questions that would suite both our topic and the participants to generate a good discussion and debate. This experience was one that introduced me to the world of online communication and debate. I was blown away at what I was able to accomplish with others in a digital meeting ground. Through this I felt convinced about what anyone could accomplish now that geographical location was not a factor that help people back from working together. This is something I try to stress in my classroom during times of research. I encourage students to think about how they now could easily talk with likeminded individuals or get information from someone more knowledgably then them and that a resource like this is there to be take advantage of. Take a look at the video below to see the webinar in its entirety.
For this section my partners and I created a video jumping into the idea of Understanding. My group and I set out to dispel and confirm certain myths and misconceptions about Understanding. We did so by choosing a topic, evaporation, coming up with some specific questions, then followed it up with figuring out what the specific answer(s) would be to each question. From there we broke down our data on peoples misconceptions on our topic and how their previous understanding helped feed into that very misconception. This let me, as an educator, figure out how common misconceptions were and thus making me more aware of ways to try and dispel people’s misconceptions when learning about a topic I am educating them on. With this I feel as if I can be a better teacher because not only can I see the signs, but now redirect students right away. This allows me to be able to really tailor learning to each individual in hopes of making it more mindful and forming a deeper connection. Take a look at the video above to see our findings.
During my time I dove into the world of Online and blended learning and teaching. For those of you who are unfamiliar with online and blended learning and teaching it is when a person learns through the use of an online portal or tool. With Online the student uses the internet only, with no "face to face" with another person, the only interactions are through web resources and materials. With Blended a students does a mixture of in the classroom learning and practicing mixed together with out of the classroom online learning and practicing. During my time in this class I learned about many various methods of online teaching and got to try out many different resources. The end produce of this class was to create an "online" lesson where students would be able to go and "take a class". Creating this course helped feed my interest in Online and Blended Education, a topic that I am personally interested in. This gave me an experience in designing my own online course, now giving me the ability to tactfully and creatively add in technology into my art room and try to take it further into the digital space. Having art be solo a "in the classroom" experience is a misconception I am working on dispelling, and with this course I believe that a now have one more tool to help fight back that idea, and I am doing just that by designing my own blended learning course for students to use both on line and in the classroom. Click on the title above or the image below to link to the online lesson I created.
Personal Growth
Throughout my time going through the master’s program I started thinking about how I could take hat information I was learning, topics I was researching into, and experiences I was having and transfer them into my classroom. This was a very tough idea to tackle being I teach art, large portions of it are hands on with various artistic mediums, but I was driven to find ways to make the students learning experience more open and enriching like mine was. From there I started including having students research into topics, "play" around with new ideas, tools, and mediums in order to discover basic understandings of how these things worked and what they could do to them, as well as incorporating more use of technological tools in order to allow deeper emersion in to the class's topics. One example is a "door design" project I introduced students to. For this project they would become designers, going to assigned teachers and getting ideas from them about themes they liked. From there students would research into their topic and design up a rough draft of that their final would look like. This portion is where students really got to use more technology based resources. Student used various high tech and low tech tools to do their research and designing. During the research portion of my projects students are always allowed to Bring their (Your) Own Devices, or BYOD, so that if an idea suddenly changes they can go to the internet for answers, or say they change the idea all together, they have access to the internet to help them find the new direction that they might want to go in. Students even used their won devices to draft up ideas, this was done by them taking pictures of the original door and the surrounding area then using an App to draw over the picture.
Along with that I have also worked on creating and maintain a web page dedicated to the student art. This allows for parents and guardians to see their child’s art any time anywhere. Follow the picture above to visit the web page and see all the students’ great projects.
This exercise was the one of the first ones done during my time in this class. What we students did was look into the provided research material and our previous knowledge and experiences then reflect upon them in a way where we would see what it was that we had assumed and acted upon during our time teaching. This helped start me down the path of looking at forms of "creativity" that I could include in my classroom and in my own teaching styles. Being aware of one’s self is important in learning and teaching, as a teacher you want to be genuine with what you are teaching, but you also want to be flexible enough to include parts that will draw student attention. By using creativity to blend these together you reach a point where students get better educational experiences than ever before, something I strive to do in my own classroom. Click on the title link above to read the full story.
This was our final part of the class, building upon all the knowledge, practice, and materials discovered mastered during our journey. This included looking back at our first realizations, the Perceiving portion, and looking about what we have learned and, more importantly, how we could use it in our teaching and learning. This final reflective piece summarizes what I have done, what I would like to do, and why I want to do these specific things. This acts as a great reflective tool that helped me internalize all the theory that I had been exposed to and pull out the parts that were not onlyimportant, but pertinent in my field and style of teaching. Doing this helped me realize the importance of using creativity to re-propose ideas, themes, and information for teaching and learning experiences. With this I think about the short term immediate response things that I can do that positively effect students long term. Click on the title above to read the entire story.
