CEP 416: Teaching & Learning with Technology 1

Fall 2009 – Dickson & Casperson

CEP 416 F09 (online)- Teaching & Learning with Technology

Greg Casperson Dr. Patrick Dickson

gcaspers@msu.edu pdickson@msu.edu
http://gcaspers.fts.educ.msu.edu 517-355-4747 (o)
517-243-8883 (c)

Course Purposes

CEP 416 will expand your knowledge and skills regarding the rapidly changing field of educational
technologies. Although an elective course, the increasing pressure to hire teachers who can instruct their
subject matter content using diverse technologies in the classroom makes the course content much more
than optional.

The course does not have a field component to it; however, the course prepares you to integrate
technology into your internship and to get a job afterward. Reflecting these purposes, you will complete a
series of weekly lab projects designed to help you develop skills with a variety of free, web-based
applications. You will also develop a web-portfolio that highlights your growth and expertise with
technology. The web portfolio prepares you to document your internship experiences and gives you a leg
up on the job market.

Learning New Technologies Perspective

We believe that learning how to use new technologies on your own is a crucial part of what it means to be
literate in new technologies. Toward this end, the course will not walk you step-by-step through how to
use each of the technologies discussed. This kind of scaffolding may be helpful in the short-term, but does
not assist you in developing independence as a consumer and user of new technologies. Rather, you will
be expected to build learning strategies as you progress through the course. For example, you might dig
into the technology directly, locate tutorials and tipsheets to guide your way, and or ask colleagues for
specific help. Thus, you have two primary learning goals—to learn how to use specific technologies and to
learn how to learn about using new technologies. A key component of learning how to learn will be
building a Personal Learning Network or PLN. This is a network of people and resources you can draw on
and communicate with to build your learning.

ANGEL, Ning, and the Wiki Gallery

ANGEL: (http://www.angel.msu.edu) Log on using your MSU NetID and password. The link for our
course will show up on your course menu. ANGEL will mainly just be for maintaining grades.

CEP416 Ning: (http://cep416.ning.com) Log on to access the main content and links to resources of our
course, contribute to discussions, and you should access it on a regular (multiple times a week) basis.

Course Syllabus and Schedule are subject to change. Every attempt will be made to notify class members of such
changes.
 CEP 416: Teaching & Learning with Technology 2
Fall 2009 – Dickson & Casperson

Wiki Gallery: (http://cep416f09online.pbworks.com/) A wiki-based gallery has been established to

showcase students’ work in this course. Each person will be responsible for updating her/his links in the
gallery. We will be sending you an email invitation to the wiki.

Required Texts

No text purchase is necessary as all readings will be available through links from our labs or MSU
libraries.

Research Participation

As educators, we strive to make data-driven decisions that help us evaluate student learning and
pedagogical strategies. This data informs the conversations we have amongst ourselves as instructors and
students and can also be useful in sharing with the wider educational community through publications
and presentations. To protect you as students, we follow three principles. First, participation in research
is voluntary; in the event that research is a requirement of the course, alternative assignments will be
available for you to receive maximum credit. Second, participation is anonymous. Any personally-
identifying information collected will be removed or changed to help protect student anonymity. Finally,
formal research projects will have been reviewed and approved by the University’s Institutional Review
Board (http://www.humanresearch.msu.edu/) to help protect your rights as participants.

Policies

Academic Honest Policy: "The principles of truth and honesty are recognized as fundamental to a
community of teachers and scholars. The University expects that both faculty and students will honor
these principles and in so doing protect the validity of University grades. This means that all academic
work will be done by the student to whom it is assigned, without unauthorized aid of any kind. (See
General Student Regulation 1.00, Scholarship and Grades, for specific regulations.) Instructors, for their
part, will exercise care in the planning and supervision of academic work, so that honest effort will be
positively encouraged." - from MSU General information, policies, procedures, and regulations, p. 24.

MSU Student Regulations: Participation assumes that students will abide by the University’s Student
Regulations (See Spartan Life: http://www.vps.msu.edu/SpLife/). Violations of these codes or legal
statutes may result in penalty in your course grade or dismissal from the course and/or university.

Course Requirements and Assessment

Reflection-Blogs and commenting (25%): Each week you should be writing in your blog several
times. Your blog should be a place for thinking through how you are learning technologies, limitations of
technologies for learning, how you might implement technologies in your teaching or with your students,
issues of student learning, issues in school use/non-use of technology, etc. Usually each week there will be
one assigned blog post but the rest you are free to choose. If it is not the assigned blog topic of the week,
another blog should be highlighting the technology you explored, linking to examples you created, and
discussing positives and negatives of your experience or take on the technology.

Course Syllabus and Schedule are subject to change. Every attempt will be made to notify class members of such
changes.
 CEP 416: Teaching & Learning with Technology 3
Fall 2009 – Dickson & Casperson

Another key component of reflecting is also reflecting/commenting on others’ blog posts. Within the first
two weeks, you will be assigned to a "House" or group of 3 to 4 in addition to a specific help partner or
"study buddy" within the House, in order to help each other out but also to give you a start on your PLN.
At a minimum, you should be commenting on each person’s blog in your House once per week, but the
more you comment on others (both classmates and those whose blogs you choose to follow) the better you
will be able to write some of your own blog posts.

You will receive feedback three times during the first ¾ of the semester on your blogging/commenting,
each representing 5 of total (25%). The first feedback will be formative with specific suggestions for
improvement and full grade as long as there seems an adequate attempt to participate as this will be a new
process for many of you and is not an easy habit to learn. The second evaluation will be mainly formative
but will also evaluate your attempts to improve participation. By the third assessment, it is expected you
will participate in blogging and commenting many times per week. Assessment will primarily be
summative with some formative feedback as necessary, and your grade will reflect your overall
participation. At the end of the semester a final grade (10%) will be given based on your total participation
in blogging/commenting, with weight given to the final half of the semester.

Labs (25%): As we introduce new technologies, you will be asked to perform a series of tasks that help
you learn more about the specific technology. The projects are, in a sense, the practice ground for you to
explore these technologies in greater depth. Details of each technology exploration lab will be posted on
our class site. You will receive 1 lab grade for each week regardless of the specific number of labs that
week. All labs for a week are due by 4pm Friday of that week (technically you will have the weekend to
finish these if necessary but will not be able to rely on feedback from instructors during the weekend, nor
will any excuses be accepted late Sunday evening). We will provide feedback for labs each week in
addition to your overall weekly lab grade. You will receive full points as long as you provide clear evidence
successes and/or failures with lab of the week.
*A special thanks goes out to Brandon Blinkenberg and Joe Freidhoff for their help in designing
many of the past labs.

Professional Web Portfolio (50%): (20% at midterm and 30% at finals): A major project in
this course is to develop a web-based portfolio that presents you as an aspiring teacher who has fresh
ideas about integrating technology in your classroom. Your web portfolio is an opportunity to richly
capture your ideas regarding the technologies introduced in this course and present them in a compelling
way to a professional audience including administrators, mentor teachers, and field instructors.

That said, there are two primary objectives in creating these portfolios. The first is for you to establish
your own teaching identity. Imagine this portfolio is the first impression that employers, students, and
parents will have about you. You’ll need to think carefully about how you want to “brand” yourself. One
of the elements that will contribute to your impression will be a working resume. The second objective of
this portfolio is to convince your audience that you have fantastic ideas about using specific technologies
in the classroom. Over the course of the semester, you will select at least TWO technologies that are
introduced in the course and create polished, web-based experiences that demonstrate your ideas for
using them in a specific classroom context. One of these should assume you work in a school is
technology impoverished which only provides one computer and projector per class, while one other

Course Syllabus and Schedule are subject to change. Every attempt will be made to notify class members of such
changes.
 CEP 416: Teaching & Learning with Technology 4
Fall 2009 – Dickson & Casperson

should assume technology enriched school, with possibly 1to1 computers/netbooks for each student. Such
technologies may include:
1. Blogs
2. Twitter
3. Web Pages
4. Wikis
5. Image Use
6. Web Presentations / Digital Storytelling
7. Sound / Audio Podcasting
8. Video / Vidcasting
9. RSS aggregators (news readers or iGoogle, netvibes, pageflakes, etc.)
10. Social Bookmarking
11. Personalized Web (full use of Netvibes, iGoogle, Pageflakes, MyYahoo, etc.)
12. Internet Calendars
13. Assistive technologies
14. Many others of your choice (this may include Google Earth, Web Conferencing, Ning, etc.)

At the very least, part of your web experiences will want to capture the essence of a lesson or unit
including:
1. What learning objectives are you addressing?
1. In this plan, you should start by identifying a specific grade level and a body of
knowledge you would like students to learn (subject/content matter). You should
consult the Michigan Grade-Level Content Expectations (GLCEs) and the Michigan
Educational Technology Standards (METS) and identify which specific standards you
are addressing.
2. What is the substance of the lesson/unit?
1. Your audience will want to gain a clear picture of what students will be asked to do and
what the desired learning outcomes are.
3. What will the performance products look like?
1. To strengthen your portfolios, you will not just tell your audience what students will be
doing, but you will actually show them mock-up examples of what you expect the
finished products will look like. By creating these examples from scratch, you not only
help your audience gain a better understanding of the lesson/unit, but you are also
more convincing by showing that you actually have the skills to pull it off.
These sections of your portfolio will undoubtedly include multimedia elements and should be available for
your audience to view directly on the web without downloading. That means you are not just linking to
pdfs or docs, although these formats might supplement your main pages. This is an excellent opportunity
for you to set yourself apart from your peers so create something impressive.

This portfolio will be assessed at the midterm (20% of grade) and the end of the semester (30% of grade).
• The midterm will require a basic portfolio layout, one of the technology integration plans, an
about page, and a draft of your resume.
• The final will require a more polished version of resume, an about page, a minimum of two
technology integration plans (one can be from midterm), a link to your blog, and an invitation/
welcome to your portfolio.

Course Syllabus and Schedule are subject to change. Every attempt will be made to notify class members of such
changes.
 CEP 416: Teaching & Learning with Technology 5
Fall 2009 – Dickson & Casperson

Flexible Course Schedule

This semester the schedule has changed quite a bit from past semesters, both to reflect on the changing
world of learning with and about technologies and because of the diverse interests of the students in the
course based on our recent survey. We will start, as mentioned earlier, on skills for building your PLN and
increasing your ability to learn how to learn about technologies. The first several weeks then will reflect
this focus to help build a foundation for learning about technologies, but then after the focus will be to
give as much opportunity for you to choose technologies most important to learn in your particular
context. Since this schedule of content has changed so much, it may need to be revised some as we go
forward. Care will be taken in making changes that most benefit you and for informing you of any such
changes. Please regard the following as a rough draft that you and I will revise as the semester progresses.
I also recommend that you take as many opportunities as possible to begin exploring early on, some of the
technologies you might choose to focus on later in the semester by looking ahead in labs, by asking your
PLN, by searching, etc. You can see a list at most things that have been covered in the past here:
http://teachingandtech.wikispaces.com/

Course Syllabus and Schedule are subject to change. Every attempt will be made to notify class members of such
changes.