Competency 3

Download Artifacts:

Narrative for Competency 3: Communicate Knowledge

My first artifact is my Basic Course Tools digital badge. This badge displays my ability to communicate effectively in oral and written form.

To earn this badge, I had to demonstrate that I could use digital tools to collaborate with my peers, create and share my coursework, store my work digitally, and reflectively review and discuss my work with others. More specifically, the challenges I completed for this badge include using screencasting technology as a demonstration tool, Google Docs as a collaborative writing tool, blogs as reflective writing tools, and Cloud storage tools as a means of curating and sharing content.
I have experience using these tools in my classroom with students, but earning this badge helped me recontextualize and reflect on how I use these tools. I had never considered, for example, using a blog as a means of communicating with my students and their families.
I know that I will leave my current school and district within a few years, so I want to use the skills I gained from completing this badge to store my course materials online for future use. Creating a blog that houses my course materials organized by topic or unit would be helpful if I need to switch LMS platforms in my next job.

I’ve selected my final project from EDCI 56000: Educational Technology for Teaching and Learning to demonstrate sub-competencies 2 and 3. This project shows my ability to effectively communicate content from discipline through the design and delivery of effective teaching/learning activities and demonstrates the ability to adapt instruction and support services to the needs of diverse learners.

For this project, I created a website that acts as my online portfolio. The site contains examples of my instructional design work, including both coursework and projects I’ve developed for my classroom.
The virtual escape room game I created is an example of how I communicate content to students through effective and engaging learning activities. To support diverse learners, I adapted my lecture slides from a lesson on literary criticism into a microlearning experience. My portfolio also contains a mockup design for a phone app used to differentiate skills-based instruction in an English language arts class. The core idea behind the app is that students can access quick, gamified instruction at their own pace and get immediate corrective feedback on their individual skills.
I have some experience creating educational games for students to increase engagement. This portfolio has allowed me to explore new technology tools to continue gamifying my instruction while adding more functionality. For example, using Genially to create an escape room game that is fully digital allows me to gain insight on student’s behavior and understanding by analyzing the data that is generated as they play the game. I can see which students needed multiple tries to advance, which students opened pages containing extra resources or support, and how much time they spent on each question or problem. This data analysis helps me differentiate my instruction to meet students’ needs, and the data would not be possible without integrating technology into the lesson.
In the future, I’d like to practice creating educational games that automatically differentiate their level of difficulty. Using some of the technology tools showcased in my online portfolio, I want to create a “branching paths scenario” so that more advanced students can participate while being challenged, and students who need extra supports receive them in-game as a result of their performance at the start of the game. I’d also like to incorporate engaging social features, such as a class leaderboard or digital badges to encourage revision and reward achievement.

I’ve chosen my final design document project from EDCI 57200: Learning Systems Design for the final sub-competency. This project demonstrates my ability to appropriately assess learning outcomes.

In this project, I designed a learning module start-to-finish, with an emphasis on writing and assessing clearly communicated terminal, performance, and subordinate objectives.
Completing an analysis of learning gaps/needs, the learning context, the performance context, and the learners themselves helped me write objectives that directly aligned with my assessments. I piloted the learning module, gathered raw data, and synthesized the results of the pilot test before reflecting on the process to spot any areas that could be improved upon moving forward. A key element to the project’s success was breaking down the objectives into individual and measurable subordinate objectives. This step allowed me to align each instructional strategy and learning activity with an objective. Once the instructional strategy and learning activities were aligned with my objectives, I knew that they were aligned with my assessments. The pilot tests were especially helpful. From them, I revised my assessments to make sure they mirrored the content from the instructional unit, utilized the same language, and actually assessed the objective(s) at hand.
I have experience writing terminal objectives for my classroom, but this project taught me how to break an objective down into its most essential parts and to separate those parts so that they can be assessed individually. I learned how to ensure my instruction, assessments, and objectives align to create the most valid and reliable assessment pieces possible.
I was surprised by just how much information I gathered from the pilot tests, and found it to be an incredibly important step in the design process. Looking ahead, I plan to use pilot testers for technology integration projects I currently have in the works. Having a second set of eyes on a project before publishing or sharing it makes a huge difference and it certainly helped me improve the quality of the finished product.