I feel as though I have had the opportunity to practice transilteracy this semester, in the process of completing my capstone project. I have now created a defense poster, many videos, a research paper, an executive summary and website that includes all of these elements and more. I am basically sending the same message out into the universe in a large variety of ways- for different audiences, and with different purposes. Transliteracy is embedded in our final semester. Completing all of these projects has helped me to see what transliteracy is, and how I can ensure that my students are able to access as well as create content in multiple ways.
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I am excited to have a completed video for my capstone project! I’m thankful that we have learned and practiced so much with making videos throughout this program, because the creation of this final video was actually a much simpler process than it has been in the past. I felt prepared with my research and my newfound video creating skills.
My defense poster has been a little bit more of a challenge for me, but it is also going pretty well. I have some more content to add to it- but visually I really like how it is looking so far. I think after I sit down with it one more time, pull in and consolidate some information from my research paper and my website, I will be able to complete it. The executive summary was also a little bit challenging. I think the challenge I’m having with these two items is squeezing an entire year’s worth of learning, research, and work into one single poster, or 4 pages worth of printed space. I’m confident that I will get there, and that I’m close. Just a little more work and I will be able to complete all of my final capstone projects! It has been almost a year since I began my Master’s work through Touro University’s Innovative Learning Program. Touro University California is a university under Jewish auspices founded upon the universal values of commitment to social justice, intellectual pursuit, and service to humanity. As such, Touro University California is dedicated to the following:
My projects have been extremely student centered, as I have been focused mainly on goal setting this year. Helping my students learn to set goals for themselves, as well as teaching them about growth mindset has helped them to become better lifelong learners. My students have collaborated and built community with each other as learners. I feel that the research I performed during my time at Touro, as well as the many things I learned that helped make me a better teacher improved the education of the students in my classroom this year, and will continue to enhance my teaching for the duration of my career. I am excited to be almost to the completion of my capstone website. I am planning to share my website with my coworkers and colleagues, as well as my friends and family. I will be able to share it in the future with people who have questions about the goal setting I do in the classroom with my students, as well as student teachers that I may have in the future. It’s hard to believe we only have a month left of this program! I finally feel like I know exactly what I need to accomplish in order to meet all of the requirements. I just have 3 main things to complete: the poster presentation, the website and the executive summary. There are all huge tasks that I have only gotten a small start on. Today I have been struggling through what to include on my poster and in my executive summary. I had a bit of a difficult time because I changed my question part way through the program, and a lot of my research paper is relevant to my new question, but not the entirety of it. It is also a challenge to be concise in a way that meets the expectations of the summary. I have a lot to say about my project, but I am trying to save those words for various locations within my capstone website if they are not appropriate for the summary. I struggled with the wording of the summary as well, since I believe it is supposed to be formatted/ phrased academically, in the same way our research paper was while the website is more of a general teacher audience and can sound a little more conversational. In all honesty I am looking forward to seeing what my peers have done and getting feedback from them and my professor of what I have done so far, because I’m feeling a little bit lost and like what I have done so far may or may not be correct!
ABOUT ME Page
Reflections on My Journey My journey through the Innovative Learning program with Touro University has been transforming. Before the opportunity presented itself with Napa Learns, I had never seriously considered obtaining my master’s degree. I didn’t think I needed or wanted it, but here I am having completed my courses and feeling eternally grateful for all of the knowledge that has made me a better teacher this year, and a mindset which will be with me for the rest of my career. The biggest change that has occured in me this year, is a simple realization. I am a leader. This program has given me so much more confidence in myself as a teacher and a professional. I feel good about what I am doing in my classroom, and I feel capable of sharing that with others. I also learned how easy it is to access the innovative ideas of other educators around the world- and seeing them give TED talks, write articles and blogs, participate in Twitter chats, speak at conferences, create tutorial videos, publish books and articles, and so much more has inspired me. It has made me realize that my ideas have the potential to be powerful, and that I actually have the ability to influence changes in education in both big and small ways. Obtaining this degree alongside my newfound knowledge, passion and confidence will also enhance these opportunities for me. I am confident that this program has transformed me into more of a leader in the realm of education than a follower. I have many ideas to share with my fellow teachers, and many avenues through which to do this. I have learned, and continue to learn a lot about how to be the best teacher I can be. I am feeling equipped to be a lifelong learner in this ever changing career. Lasting Learnings One of the main takeaways I have from this program is that our student's futures are largely unpredictable. It has been touched on repeatedly in my learning this year- by authors, speakers, writers, professors and teachers- how the rapidly accelerating pace of change in technology and development of information and ideas is putting us in a context of teaching students for a future that we have no understanding of. This has reminded me to focus on 21st century skills more in my classroom, because the students are going to need to have strategies in their pockets rather than specific skills. We as teachers are never going to be experts in the ever changing and developing field we have selected, and our students will likely be in the same position regardless of the career field they choose. We need to train them to be the creators of the new content, the authors, artists, leaders and activists that the future needs. This program has introduced me to a number of technology tools that I can use in my classroom today to encourage those strategies in my students, but has also given me a forward thinking mindset as a teacher. I know that the specific tools I used in this program will help me in the classroom today, but the program has also prepared me for the unknown of what is coming up in education. Instead of dreading change like many veteran educators of today do, I anticipate it. I am ready to learn about the tech tools that will be coming out in the next 5 years. I will not know how to use them all, but I promise to try them in my classroom with an open mind. TPACK Developing an understanding of TPACK through this program has helped me to implement new technology tools into my classroom. This enhanced my student’s goal setting experiences and my ability to conduct meaningful research surrounding it. Using technology in the classroom in conjunction with pedagogy and content is the only way to use technology effectively in the classroom. Without pedagogy and content, technology has little to no purpose in the classroom. When the three are used in conjunction with each other, teachers can create lasting learning and inspire students to be their best. Overall, what I’m hoping to share with the world of education after completing this program, is that innovating involves taking risks. We have to try out lots of new things, and keep only what works for our particular students with our content and curriculum. This means each year, innovating in the classroom may look different, not to say that we throw out what is tried and true, but to say that we can always find a way to make our teaching better- more interesting, more current, and more applicable. This time creating a video wasn’t as much of a challenge for me as it has been in the past, because we have used all of these tools throughout the program so many times I am fairly comfortable creating these types of videos.
The most challenging parts for me were taking my data charts off of Google Sheets and Google Forms and getting them clearly and centered into my video. I ended up using a screenshot app and cropping it down, but the first time I tried the screenshot it came out blurry, so I feel like the ability to save charts as images could be improved. The other thing that was a bit of a challenge was writing my script. It was hard for me to know exactly what to include. I was really trying to keep it simple this time, but I didn’t want it to be so simple that it wasn’t useful to my viewers. I also wanted to make sure it was engaging and provided a hook for my viewers, like many of the sample capstone videos did. Overall, I am happy with how my video is turning out. It still needs a little bit of work, but I think that I will be able to achieve my goals of grabbing my audience's attention while keeping the information presented in the video short and simple, allowing the visitor to explore more of the work on my site at their own pace. Here I am in the final semester of my master’s program! In many ways it feels like we have just begun this journey, and in others it seems as though we’ve been paddling upstream for years. I am confident that this program has transformed me into more of a leader in the realm of education than a follower. I have so many ideas to share with my fellow teachers, and so many avenues through which to do this. I have learned a lot and continue to learn a lot about teaching.
I am feeling equipped to be a lifelong learner in this ever changing career. My goal is to keep up with what’s happening in education as long as I am in it. I think that my cohort members feel the same way, and if not- then they should! Bring some ideas back to your school site and see what happens. I think it’s okay to start really small, maybe share what you’re doing with your grade level partner and see if they can try it too. I’ve found a lot of teachers are scared to try new tech tools, but once they see that it isn’t too scary or challenging and that it could actually make their lives easier and engage the students more, they are happy to try it. For the rest of the journey throughout this program, I hope that my cohort members and I will do exactly what we’ve been doing this whole time, which is supporting each other, giving positive and critical feedback, reading each other’s work and understanding the purpose of each person’s capstone project and research, and asking questions when we are confused, because I think we have learned that when one of us isn’t understanding of what we are supposed to do- it is usually the majority of us who aren’t getting it. Being in this cohort has been such a great experience and I wish nothing but the best for my fellow final semester master’s program friends! Creating a storyboard and script for my video seemed like a daunting task to me at first because I had never made one before, but once I got started I realized that the storyboard especially was really going to help me ensure that I included all the correct information within my video.
Creating the video still seems a little bit overwhelming, but watching some of the other examples helped me to remember that they are very short and concise, which is what we want- because on the user end I would definitely not watch a video on someone’s home page if it was over 2 minutes long. This is a nice quick way to visually introduce visitors to the information which will be presented in our research and website. I am getting excited to share my information with the digital world, because I’ve put so much time and effort into it. It will be cool to have everything in one place, and then when people ask what I studied, or want information on goal setting I can show them my site. I decided to use either Windows movie maker or Adobe Spark, or maybe a combination of the two tools to create my video. I liked how one of the videos I watched had background music and voiceover and I know that’s super easy to do with Spark, however if I decide to splice in some of my video that I captured of my students talking about goal setting, I may want to trim them with Movie Maker, which I have used before and feel comfortable with. I’m looking forward to having this come together! I think the audience for my capstone website is going to be other teachers. Ideally, teachers of all experience levels and of all grade levels would be able to apply the information found on my website to their classrooms. The content is mainly going to be related to elementary school students, so I’m hoping it’s information that I can share with my colleagues, and beginning teachers. I had a student teacher this year and it was really nice sharing some information with her, and getting information from her as well- so having beginning teachers in mind as a part of my audience is something that’s on my mind as well. Goal setting with students can make such a big impact on their academic success, that I hope my work can help teachers and their students. I think that to reach my audience I am going to need to make my site engaging, but at the same time simple and concise. I don’t want my visitors to get overwhelmed, I want them to see how easy it can be to implement goal setting strategies in the classroom. I also want them to feel like it’s a manageable task for them, even if they aren’t super comfortable using tech tools. On my learn more pages, I would really like to include a lot of the research that I did with my students on goal setting, and examples of their work- and then a lot of resources and websites that can help other teachers accomplish what I have so far in my classroom. I would like to have previews or tutorial videos on there so that teachers understand how the tools I am recommending are used. When I went to begin my logo design I felt very overwhelmed, as graphic design and logo creation is not something I have a lot of knowledge about. I clicked on a few different design websites, but wasn’t really happy until I found Canva. I enjoyed using Canva because it was user friendly, and free. They do have additional purchase options, but it is definitely possible to use only free features and still create a nice looking logo. I began clicking and dragging and changing colors, sizes, fonts and location of the items. I came up with 3 draft options in about an hour. I think that I will end up modifying them quite a bit from here, but I have some ideas now and feel way less overwhelmed. I plan to add color, but currently my drafts are all black and white because I couldn’t decide on a scheme, and I wanted to see how they would look regardless of color. Here are my first attempts at creating a logo: Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly and easily a logo could actually be created. The variety of what you can do with a logo is a bit overwhelming, but after this first try I am feeling confident that I will be able to come up with a logo that I like for my capstone website that represents the goal setting strategies I want to share with other teachers.
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AuthorKayla Bryant is an elementary school teacher in Napa, CA. This year she teaches a 2/3 combo class. She keeps a journal with funny quotes from her students, and enjoys learning and laughing alongside them. Some of her main educational interests are related to goal setting, growth mindset, and creativity. Archives
July 2018
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